Interesting that you say this. In my experience EC2 instances have been major part of bill. Can't comment on Snapchat scaling with just 2 guys but I have seen

Interesting that you say this. In my experience EC2 instances have been major part of bill. Can't comment on Snapchat scaling with just 2 guys but I have seen people trip up with managed services as well for eg. DynamoDB (https://hackernoon.com/beware-of-dilution-of-dynamodb-throughput-due-to-excessive-scaling-4df51063edae https://hackernoon.com/beware-of-dilution-of-dynamodb-throug...). Similarly for EMR - lot of issues where you still needed to understand how Hadoop was managed by EMR (Spark and HBase versions, jar mismatch, classpaths). So if you are getting into something complex you still need to hire people to manage infrastructure of course not at the same level as building your own DC but OP is talking about using a cheaper cloud provider. My personal opinion is to use EC2 and then take managed services from cloud agnostic vendor (preferably Open Source at core providing services on all major clouds). Does not lock you and lets you move fast - ex. Managed Kafka/Hortonworks