AWS makes a lot of sense in a 24/7 environment, particularly when you are a new startup and don't have enough information (or capital!) to make educated server purchases.
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.