[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.