[Pfhreak]

There should be data available for #1 -- it's not something we should need much subjective discussion around.

Re #2: I love all the other stuff. I never use EC2. Lambda, Cognito, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFront, Route 53, and API Gateway are my default stack, managed by Cloudformation. Granted, I'm doing smaller projects, but the costs are minimal, the setup time is trivial, the documentation is excellent, everything is nicely compartmentalized and 'just works' together. And I only pay for the actual traffic to the site.

[parsnips]

This is the way. We've given multiple clients very similar stacks for "api layers" and it's by far the most cost effective way to do AWS from both productivity and opex point of view.