I tend to do my Linux dabbling on the cloud. I rarely make use of the fancy services available on AWS, but that's not the only advantage of AWS, as they also do

I tend to do my Linux dabbling on the cloud. I rarely make use of the fancy services available on AWS, but that's not the only advantage of AWS, as they also do a fine job with the basic abstractions relating to EC2 instances. One example is firewalls. I'd expected Linode and Digital Ocean to offer cloud firewalls the way EC2 does, but no. When I create a new Linode instance, all ports are open to the world. On EC2, I can easily restrict new instances so that incoming connections are only permitted from my IP. That gives me protection against flaws in the SSH server. I think it makes good sense to handle this at the cloud level, rather than configuring a firewall inside the instance. Another example is that Linode and Digital Ocean will charge me the full hourly rate for an instance even when it's switched off. To avoid this, you have to manually create an image of your instance, then later restore it. Not so on EC2, where they've really thought through all the abstractions.