[travisglines]

On the spectrum of scaling an application AWS has definitely leaned hard towards scaling out. (where the other end is scaling up) This means it caters a little more to denormalized databases and load balanced web servers than it does to one giant mysql database server or a cluster of a few large database servers.

I agree with nethergoat in that if you need low latency communication between ec2 instances that you should be using their hpc instances with faster/optomized ethernet.

I however disagree with nethergoat and agree with cagenut and think that the vast-majority of applications still currently depend more on a scale up paradigm. That is slowly moving towards scale out as people/businesses see its benefits and AWS is catering to this trend.