[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.

[AaronBBrown]

That's a great accomplishment in such a short period of time. I'm glad that you were able to save time and money by using another service. Thankfully, there are tons of options out there to suit every business' use cases.

[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.