[dangrossman]

They don't have to make any purchasing decisions. They can rent servers from companies like Softlayer and Rackspace (#3 and #4 behind AWS for YC startups), or spin up much cheaper VPS's (Linode's #2). We're talking $120/month commitments, not buying hardware and driving to a data center to install it. Deploying to a freshly imaged physical server is the same as deploying to EC2, and they can be provisioned for you in an hour or two. Each of those servers gets you many times the performance of an EC2 instance in the same price class, which means much more time to figure out your capacity needs as you grow.

[AaronBBrown]

As someone who has worked w/ AWS (and Rackspace) for several years with multiple startups...

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.

[dangrossman]

You've completely moved the goalposts; "testing automation tools" where your servers live for a few minutes then get destroyed is not the same as "a 24/7 environment". I didn't suggest renting servers to do ephemeral testing.

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.

[banachtarski]

You speak as though ops and automation is too mysterious for a startup to handle. There are so many tools and frameworks that do what AWS does that it's easy to acquire that expertise. And who says you always need a new server to iterate quickly?

I moved my last company completely off AWS and it was proven to be a great decision across a number of dimensions.

[AaronBBrown]

Can you list some of those tools and provide an estimate of how long they take to configure and how much day-to-day support they require?

[banachtarski]

Sure. Pop in opscode chef. Took me a weekend to write the basic framework, 3 weeks to make it solid. The 3 weeks more than paid for itself and hosting the config servers with them is a couple hundred a month. I could've hosted it myself too. This includes support for things like a load balancer, heterogeneous nodes (db, app, cache, chat, etc).

Ansible, puppet, sprinkler, and the like would take a similar amount of time to configure.

[AaronBBrown]

A bunch of Chef cookbooks does not AWS make. Configuration management tools are of course a necessity in AWS but do not replace their offerings.

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.

[banachtarski]

had master slave, had fault tolerant load balancing, had backup scripts, tested restore procedures. also had node upgrade procedures, and more.

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.

[ErrantX]

I don't really follow you here; AWS is infrastructure. So all the chef/puppet stuff has to happen anyway.

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.

[banachtarski]

When I said AWS I was speaking more about the entire ecosystem which includes a load balancer, databases with failover, snapshotting, backups, dns lookups, and more.

[TillE]

So use AWS or Linode for that specific use case. Great, that's its strength.

Once it's clear that the new server will be needed long-term, transition to dedicated hardware to save money and get better performance.

[bearbin]

DigitalOcean - Same or better speed, 1/6 or less of the price of ECC.

[AaronBBrown]

DO has a very limited API, no ability to add additional storage without resizing your droplets, and has no firewall protection without iptables being enabled. DO has its uses (I'm migrating my personal server there presently), but it's not even close to being in the same market/caliber as EC2.

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.

[mvleming]

Hey, I've started to learn about devops and systems administration recently and I've learned a ton in this thread and this article, so thanks for that and thanks to everyone else.

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 :)

[joevandyk]

AWS is PCI compliant. http://aws.amazon.com/compliance/pci-dss-level-1-faqs/

DigitalOcean and most others are not.

AWS's security and API is lightyears ahead of everyone else.

[mbreese]

Yes, this is all true. But the question remains - how much is that worth to you? For some it will be mandatory. For others (particularly startups), not as much.

[themartorana]

If said startup is storing any personal data, it better be important.