[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 :)