[jewel]

Really you'd want to compare EC2 and real hardware, not AWS and real hardware. AWS as a total package comes with a great many services, and if you're using more than a few of them then it can require a great deal of engineering time to set up replacements.

A lot of AWS services can be used by real hardware though, so it's not all or nothing.

For example, where I work we use S3 to store an archive of files but keep the working set of data cached on our web servers which are at codero.

We have video rendering servers which turned out to be much cheaper to do with a cluster of desktop-class hardware in a server closet at our office as opposed to the server grade GPU instances on EC2. The monthly cost of a single GPU instance at EC2 is more than the total cost of the hardware off of newegg.

However, for outages we have a script that spins up GPU instances on EC2 which is much more economical than having a separate set of servers somewhere just in case.

[kovyrin]

Yep, that is why in the article I specifically pointed out that we have migrated from EC2, but we are still a loyal customer of some of AWS services and those work really nice for us.

[nanoGeek]

Great point, seems like after all the biggest issue with AWS is the inconsistent performance. But if you use S3 to store files this is not an issue...