The more fundamental problem is the lack of separation between their trading engine and their website. While a website would be perfectly fine on AWS (and likely the more significant part of their scaling problems), the trading engine belongs on a very tightly controlled platform.

I don't have any confidence in their platform. It shouldn't take more than a few domain experts to build a better platform...but for some reason its not happening.

To be fair, it's my understanding that EC2 are virtual machines. If they use EC2, they need to be 100% certain that their servers are safe and don't fall victim to the Bitcoinica Linode attack. http://bitcoinmagazine.com/the-bitcoinica-linode-theft-and-w...

Yeah, because AWS = instant scaling.

This sort of operation needs physical hardware in their own secure location. This isn't some mobile social webapp.

I don't think that using AWS would help them that much. They need to keep very secure (know any banks that use AWS?), and the main trading engine can't be parallelised anyway (because of order sequence and the blockchain).

(Also: Amazon would chuck them out as soon as the first senator reached for their phone, as with wikileaks.)

One of the problems here is that an exchange buying and selling one thing doesn't benefit much from scale. The core of a matching engine relies on knowing everything that happened before it, i.e. every trade submitted which has not been matched or cancelled. This pushes the matching process down to a single thread on a single machine.

I am building a matching engine now (for pleasure) at

https://github.com/fmstephe/matching_engine

(Having said all that I have no idea where their performance problems are coming from - the matching engine may not be the culprit)

A full month to provision new servers seems awfully long. Even if you don't want to go full cloud (which could make sense, I'm not judging that), you can easily get dedicated servers installed and configured in less than a day.

I think if any of the important parts operated on AWS, governments would be quick to take advantage of that to shut it down ("it's used int eh drugztrade~!").