[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.