gazarsgo

for that list of features, you either don't need it because of how Ansible works, or there's an inventory plugin for it.

I've been using Ansible for a couple weeks now and it is awesome how simple it is compared to Chef/Puppet (IMO)

"you get very little control over the environment" also seems spurious. You get parameter groups to control just about everything you can from a standalone mysql instance. logs or things that load from disk (LOAD DATA ...) are the only things you can't touch, but a small price to pay for automated backups, failover and scaling (both up AND down...)

disagree. the only area it really hurts the wallet is multi-AZ on your RDS, because it doubles your cost no matter what and RDS is toughest to scale horizontally. The upside is if you scale your data layer horizontally you don't need to use RDS anymore.

two c1.medium, which are very nice for webservers, are enough to host >1M pageviews a month (wordpress, not much caching) and cost around $120/mo each, effective $97/mo if you prepay for 12months at a time via reserved instances.

heroku only uses one AZ, apparently. Which is completely awful, for a PaaS...

multi-az in RDS does the replication and automatic failover for you, no sharding necessary.

You sound like you are siloing your developers by having individuals in charge of stories and also being the gatekeeper to production. You should be baking TEAM review and TEAM approval into your development process especially if you want to start doing continuous deployment, and it sounds like you have jumped off a cliff without a parachute if you have eliminated dedicated QA...

If your team decides they want to involve some public shame in their processes that's one thing but it's extremely dangerous for any manager to introduce themselves and it should never relate to production.

The team owns the code.