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by _zen 4517 days ago
> particularly when you are a new startup and don't have enough information (or capital!) to make educated server purchases.

I doubt there are many founders who are technically informed enough to know about Amazon Web Services, but don't know about the other big 3 (Digital Ocean, Linode, Rackspace). If you truly don't, then you must not be a tech company, and I have a hard time believing a non-tech company without any technical founders would even know about AWS.
2 comments
mbreese 4517 days ago
I've seen places where they had an Amazon instance up 24/7 just sitting there idle, while they paid hundreds a month. Just because they occasionally needed a server for data processing. Someone told them that it was fast to spin up an AWS instance, so they did. But no one told them how to manage it, and the people doing the work were not very competent at system administration. So, they wasted thousands on idle time, just because no one told them how to snapshot their EBS volumes and terminate an instance.

More people know about AWS than you may realize.

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AaronBBrown 4517 days ago
DO, Linode, and Rackspace have lower bottom line costs, but a (much) smaller feature set which means more operational work. Especially when kicking things off, developer and operational time is often far more valuable than the cost of the servers.
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mbreese 4517 days ago
Yeah, but it you start out using too much of the AWS tools, you're far more likely to get trapped in the AWS infrastructure and end up paying significantly more in the long term (which is what they want!). I'm not saying that AWS doesn't have useful features, but you need to appreciate the costs of these things before starting. If you need to spend a bit more time on devops in the beginning, then so be it. If you're starting a company, there had better be some good reasons behind using AWS, aside from "because faster iteration, developer time!".

Specifically - what AWS features do you find to be useful at the beginning? You seem to have some specific use-cases in mind. I'm legitimately curious.

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jon-wood 4516 days ago
Depending which tools you're using you'll have to do a bit of work to migrate out of AWS, but there tools are usually pretty standard stuff managed for you.

For example, RDS is just a database instance with management. You'd have to invest some time to replicate what AWS already does for you, but its not rocket science. The same for Elasticache, Autoscaling, ELB, and most of their other services.

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mvleming 4516 days ago
This is off-topic, but because I've just recently started my foray into devops/systems administration do you know any lists of good resources to learn about those two things? I'd love to see a guide like this [1] except that's for analytics.

Things like what you should do right after you SSH into a server, how to make your server secure, setting up nginx, chmod'ing permissions of files correctly, and things I don't even know.

Regardless if you get back to me, I appreciate you taking the time to read this :)

[1] https://segment.io/academy/

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