[decwakeboarder]

We all just wing it.

The good thing is that services and charges that are hard to estimate (SQS, egress network bandwidth, S3 access charges) are mostly drops in a bucket compared to those that are easy to plan for (ec2, RDS, S3 / Dynamo storage).

[tobz]

Right. There's a lot of simple choices you can make -- SQS instead of RabbitMQ, ELBs instead of HAProxy -- that aren't going to cut your burn rate in half or anything.

The estimation part is definitely very hard to do for the things you mentioned at the end, especially things like DynamoDB which want you to specify throughput. Not only do you spend time on that, you then spend time on handling when you exceed your provisioned throughput, etc. There's a lot of time spent thinking about shit there.

Anywho, I agree overall. Some of their services just make sense to use because you'll be hard pressed to paint yourself into a corner with them.