[mbreese]

True, but outside of S3 and Route53, how much under the AWS umbrella is much use without using at least one EC2 instance?

I can see a lot of benefit to using S3 without EC2, but after that, I'm not sure what else would be possible. Care to elaborate more?

Can you use their queues and database tools w/o using EC2? (If you are using a VPC, maybe?)

[berkay]

Not sure why it has to be without EC2 to be useful. The main benefit is indeed the fact that you can have VMs, queue, load balancers, databases, DNS, cache, etc. all using consistent APIs, etc. You can create dev/test environments that are as close to prod as possible with fraction of the cost, etc.

In our case (and I'm pretty sure we're not in the fringe) when you consider all costs including the administrative overhead, etc. EC2 costs are not significant portion of the cost. Just to give an idea, for us, even if someone had offered VM hosting for free, it would not be cost effective for us to move. For a company that have very high processing requirements it could be a different story. I just wanted to mention that the value added by services in addition to EC2 is sufficiently high that even if EC2 costs are higher than alternative (and they are higher), AWS can still provide significant savings.

Time of a highly skilled dev/ops person is (very) valuable, and not something we can buy more of easily. Anything that saves us time, implement faster pays for itself pretty easily. If you don't have a massive EC2 bill, chances are AWS overall is a good proposition.

[waps]

Considering just how much more expensive AWS is, I have my doubts on this. AWS also really likes "hiding" costs, like bandwidth costs. It's not obvious that most sites will go over the bandwidth limit and pay extra, whereas for sites on VPS providers, this won't happen. In reality they have a billion different line items on every bill, and most are not mentioned on their pricing pages.

Expect to pay a LOT more than you'd expect to pay from the pricing page.

I don't get the whole line of reasoning : either your project is not important and having weekly or monthly backups is certainly sufficient. In such a case, having a script to backup a VPS is by far the most cost efficient way to run the project.

If your project is important enough to have a complex AWS setup, you have an admin anyway.

"But you can trust amazon". Well, no : http://www.businessinsider.com.au/amazon-lost-data-2011-4 (note that disasters on VPS/dedicated servers are also rare)

If you're making complex AWS setups because "it's cool", then by all means, but keep in mind that you're paying a lot for the privilege. Don't do this on production.

[berkay]

I can only give you a datapoint. This has not been the case in our case. We never paid more than what we expected.

If you think VPS providers is an alternative to AWS, you have an entirely different use case than ours. For an application with high availability requirements, messages queues, scalable data store, etc. admin work is not "monthly backups". Implementing and maintaining highly available load balancing, message queues, data stores, DNS, auto scaling, etc. all require a lot of work, and often skills that you may not have in the team. AWS makes these tasks easier. You still have to do admin work, but much less of it, and don't have to be expert at each one. That's worth a lot.

[jessaustin]

You're moving the goalposts. First you said:

AWS really only makes sense ($$) when you can take advantage of the ability to spin up and spin down your instances as needed.

After it's pointed out that other facilities besides EC2 motivate people to use AWS, you can't turn around and complain that those other facilities are useless without EC2. Even if that were true (it's not), such people would be using EC2 not for its load-scaling, but rather to enable their use of the non-EC2 facilities.

[mbreese]

Who's moving goal posts? After it was (correctly) pointed out that AWS!=EC2 (even though most of the original post was talking about EC2), I asked a simple question - how useful are the rest of the services outside of EC2? It is a legitimate question.

I'm not sure how useful everything in the AWS umbrella is outside of EC2. I was hoping to learn something, not provoke anyone.

[jessaustin]

I guess I misunderstood you; no worries!

[micah_chatt]

"Can you use their queues and database tools w/o using EC2?" Yes, you very easily can. RDS is a simple setup, and so is SQS (queuing). The same goes for Dynamo and Redshift.

[jcampbell1]

Are you really going tolerate 10+ ms of latency between a database, and an app server? I have never personally tried it, but it seems like it would be a disaster.

[toomuchtodo]

I just tested pinging our public RDS instance (non-VPC) from one of our EC2 instances that is loading data ever 1-3 minutes from S3 objects into that RDS instance from within a VPC. 3-5ms ping times. More than acceptable.

[ErrantX]

It's not 10ms. Halfway through a staged AWS migration now and the latency has really not been an issue. This is from a London data centre to AWS Ireland.

At most it's been 4 to 6 ms. And that has coped with our heaviest load.

[AznHisoka]

Heh, heck my db and app live in the same data center, and the latency is more than 30-40 MS.

[mcpherrinm]

Really? That seems enormously too slow. Even over the internet, I'm within 5-10ms of most things in the bay area.

If you have a dozen slow (100us) switches, three slow (2ms) routers, and 500 kilometers of fibre (2ms), you should still be under 10ms each way. And that's enough gear to cross some countries.

I'm curious how you can do much worse than this in a data center. Maybe some pokey "application firewall" or massive buffer bloat?

[vacri]

The problem here is that you're classifying everything AWS does as "EC2", which then causes confusion when someone else comes along and says "vendor X does everything EC2 does for half the price", and they mean solely the VM-related stuff, not the additional array of services.

[mbreese]

That's a problem with the comments for this whole post. AWS means a lot of different things to different people. While I focused on EC2, others focused on RDS or S3 or ELB, etc... it's easy to get off on a tangent.

When everything is covered under the AWS umbrella, it's easy to argue from any side you want.

I still think that it's important to consider whether or not AWS (for all values of AWS) correctly fits your workload. You may not need the ability to spin up servers within minutes, or have multi-datacenter redundancy in a database, or have virtually unlimited storage, or a robust queuing system. A lot of great engineering has gone into all of the AWS products, and for many instances it is probably overkill. And that can cost you a lot if you don't know what you're doing.