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You're not paying more to start out. It will be far, far cheaper to just use Kinesis / Lambda / S3 than to pay someone to learn about, set up, manage, and maint

You're not paying more to start out. It will be far, far cheaper to just use Kinesis / Lambda / S3 than to pay someone to learn about, set up, manage, and maintain remotely comparable infrastructure. It will take far less code, infrastructure, maintenance, know-how, and time. It's not even close. More importantly, though: you quite possibly won't ever find yourself "priced off of aws." Netflix isn't. Workday isn't. Spotify isn't. Pinterest isn't. Dropbox only transitioned off very recently (reportedly for more control). Some of the biggest players on the web were able to scale and grow beyond most of our wildest dreams without it holding them back, yet still some recommend adding significant man-hours and complexity up-front just on the off-chance it becomes necessary after it's successful? Let's be realistic here.

novembermike 9y ago
The pattern I've seen is that AWS makes sense for startups, then you hit a point where you need a hundred hosts in a couple of data centers and you can do that more cheaply with raw hardware and a small team to handle it. Then you hit a point where you need thousands or tens of thousands of servers in multiple countries and you need to handle legal and logistic concerns and it's better to be in AWS (or GCE or whatever) again. That's the reason I've heard that Netflix and a lot of the other big companies are there.