If you don't have an elastic workload and are keeping all of your servers online 24/7, then you should investigate dedicated hardware from another provider. AWS really only makes sense ($$) when you can take advantage of the ability to spin up and spin down your instances as needed.
If we went with all of our own dedicated hardware, or cheaper instances from a different cloud provider then we'd miss out on ELB, have slower and more expensive communication to and from S3, not to mention that services like Elastic Beanstalk make deploying to EC2 instances very easy compared with rolling your own deployment system. And for those who don't want to bother with administrating databases and cache machines RDS and Elasticache are going to be cheapest and fastest if your instances are EC2.
So yeah I agree that EC2 is expensive, but the benefits of living fully within the Amazon ecosystem are pretty large.
I can see a lot of benefit to using S3 without EC2, but after that, I'm not sure what else would be possible. Care to elaborate more?
Can you use their queues and database tools w/o using EC2? (If you are using a VPC, maybe?)
If you have a dozen slow (100us) switches, three slow (2ms) routers, and 500 kilometers of fibre (2ms), you should still be under 10ms each way. And that's enough gear to cross some countries.
I'm curious how you can do much worse than this in a data center. Maybe some pokey "application firewall" or massive buffer bloat?
At most it's been 4 to 6 ms. And that has coped with our heaviest load.
When everything is covered under the AWS umbrella, it's easy to argue from any side you want.
I still think that it's important to consider whether or not AWS (for all values of AWS) correctly fits your workload. You may not need the ability to spin up servers within minutes, or have multi-datacenter redundancy in a database, or have virtually unlimited storage, or a robust queuing system. A lot of great engineering has gone into all of the AWS products, and for many instances it is probably overkill. And that can cost you a lot if you don't know what you're doing.
AWS really only makes sense ($$) when you can take advantage of the ability to spin up and spin down your instances as needed.
After it's pointed out that other facilities besides EC2 motivate people to use AWS, you can't turn around and complain that those other facilities are useless without EC2. Even if that were true (it's not), such people would be using EC2 not for its load-scaling, but rather to enable their use of the non-EC2 facilities.
I'm not sure how useful everything in the AWS umbrella is outside of EC2. I was hoping to learn something, not provoke anyone.
In our case (and I'm pretty sure we're not in the fringe) when you consider all costs including the administrative overhead, etc. EC2 costs are not significant portion of the cost. Just to give an idea, for us, even if someone had offered VM hosting for free, it would not be cost effective for us to move. For a company that have very high processing requirements it could be a different story. I just wanted to mention that the value added by services in addition to EC2 is sufficiently high that even if EC2 costs are higher than alternative (and they are higher), AWS can still provide significant savings.
Time of a highly skilled dev/ops person is (very) valuable, and not something we can buy more of easily. Anything that saves us time, implement faster pays for itself pretty easily. If you don't have a massive EC2 bill, chances are AWS overall is a good proposition.
Expect to pay a LOT more than you'd expect to pay from the pricing page.
I don't get the whole line of reasoning : either your project is not important and having weekly or monthly backups is certainly sufficient. In such a case, having a script to backup a VPS is by far the most cost efficient way to run the project.
If your project is important enough to have a complex AWS setup, you have an admin anyway.
"But you can trust amazon". Well, no : http://www.businessinsider.com.au/amazon-lost-data-2011-4 (note that disasters on VPS/dedicated servers are also rare)
If you're making complex AWS setups because "it's cool", then by all means, but keep in mind that you're paying a lot for the privilege. Don't do this on production.
If you think VPS providers is an alternative to AWS, you have an entirely different use case than ours. For an application with high availability requirements, messages queues, scalable data store, etc. admin work is not "monthly backups". Implementing and maintaining highly available load balancing, message queues, data stores, DNS, auto scaling, etc. all require a lot of work, and often skills that you may not have in the team. AWS makes these tasks easier. You still have to do admin work, but much less of it, and don't have to be expert at each one. That's worth a lot.
Unless they have dramatically improved their offering in the last couple years, an hour or two from "I need a new server" to delivery is 1) not an accurate timeframe for physical servers from Rackspace and 2) even if it was realistic, that's an eternity when you are trying to iterate quickly. I can have a new server in 30 seconds with AWS and in the course of an hour could have tested my automation tools half a dozen times or more vs reimaging a server over and over again.
I'm not saying it's always the right choice or that it's cheaper, but that flexibility combined with some of the pre-canned tools (ELB, RDS, CloudWatch, SQS, SNS) has tremendous value even when you aren't autoscaling.
I only have experience renting physical hardware from Softlayer. They have built and imaged new servers for me in under 2 hours a dozen times, day and night. They also have a "xpress servers" line with guaranteed <2hr delivery. They also let you reimage your servers through their control panel or API; you don't need to have a new one built just to get a fresh disk image.
Once it's clear that the new server will be needed long-term, transition to dedicated hardware to save money and get better performance.
For some businesses, the huge AWS feature set (RDS, EBS, ELB, security groups, VPC, ELB, EIPs, etc, etc, etc) is more valuable than the bottom $$ line. For others, those features aren't worth the added cost, but hand-wavey "just use DO" or "Just rent physical servers from SoftLayer/Rackspace" is disingenous.
TL;DR AWS has value above and beyond simply hour-to-hour elasticity.
But do you know of any good resources to learn about those two things? And I'm taking about basic devops, before you even start worrying about automating, and the things you would actually automate–because I don't know what it is I should be doing in the first place.
Things like what you should be doing right after you SSH into your server, how to make your server secure, how to use nginx, chmod'ing permissions of files correctly, and things I don't even know about.
Is there a One Month Rails or Michael Hartl's RoR Tutorial for devops/sys admin?
Regardless, thanks for taking the time to read this :)
DigitalOcean and most others are not.
AWS's security and API is lightyears ahead of everyone else.
I moved my last company completely off AWS and it was proven to be a great decision across a number of dimensions.
Ansible, puppet, sprinkler, and the like would take a similar amount of time to configure.
I'm very impressed that you were able to build in 3 weeks time a low-latency multi-data center application with master/slave database failover, robust fault tolerant load balancing, and backups that can be restored in minutes with an API to control all of those services. That would normally take a senior team of engineers several months to accomplish and have it be of the quality and reliability of the services provided by AWS.
More likely is that you had a use case or a mindset that did not suit AWS very well and was easy to implement on your own. That's awesome and I'm glad you were able to find better value elsewhere. AWS is not for everyone, and is definitely quite expensive on the pocketbook.
it was more than just chef obviously but chef + any bare metal host environment gets you a large percentage of the way there. Tacking on specific aws services like route53 when necessary works too.
The benefit of AWS is that you have some immediate bootstrap, and simple auto scaling. This last is a killer feature. Being able to scale your caches and load balances silently, based on metrics, is a real time and money saver.
Sure. You need to have a level of scale to need that :) but when you do, AWS can have some good features.
If all you need is a server that is up 24/7, rent it by the month. You don't need information to make an educated choice, since they are pretty much all cheaper than EC2.
I doubt there are many founders who are technically informed enough to know about Amazon Web Services, but don't know about the other big 3 (Digital Ocean, Linode, Rackspace). If you truly don't, then you must not be a tech company, and I have a hard time believing a non-tech company without any technical founders would even know about AWS.
More people know about AWS than you may realize.
Specifically - what AWS features do you find to be useful at the beginning? You seem to have some specific use-cases in mind. I'm legitimately curious.
Things like what you should do right after you SSH into a server, how to make your server secure, setting up nginx, chmod'ing permissions of files correctly, and things I don't even know.
Regardless if you get back to me, I appreciate you taking the time to read this :)
For example, RDS is just a database instance with management. You'd have to invest some time to replicate what AWS already does for you, but its not rocket science. The same for Elasticache, Autoscaling, ELB, and most of their other services.