[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.