I ended up replacing the following:
- Mongodb on a EC2 instance instead of Dynamodb
- EC2 Mysql instance instead of RDS
- Redis instance instead of Elastic Cache
- Solr on EC2 instead of Cloud Search
- FFmpeg instance instead of Elastic transcoder
But I'm one of those crazy people who considers their time and that worth something.
Excuse the snark, but these arguments just keep repeating themselves. There's a reason they're called "services". It's like saying "it's cheaper to slaughter your own cow than to eat at a restaurant".
We're transitioning off Dynamo as soon as possible as the billing structure makes it either a real headache or very expensive.
For example: if you want to make a backup of a large table or move data around, it'll either take days or cost you an arm and a leg. This is just one of many annoyances. Ever since making the decision to go with Dynamo over Mongo, I've been getting dirty looks from my team.
1. What kind of EC2 instance are we talking about for MongoDB? If you're not using an SSD, comparing Dynamo and Mongo wouldn't be an apples-to-apples comparison.
2. I buy that the strictly technical costs of these systems is lower, but I'm not certain I buy that the overall cost (including engineer time to set these services up and monitor them) is lower.
2. Maybe it is just me, but I really think that some services like mongodb/redis does not require a big amount of system administration work to setup, I have actually wrote many python scripts to automate most of these tasks. but again maybe this depends on the country and the IT culture.