We could argue about how many orders of magnitude, but I agree. It's absolutely easier in some ways. I'm just saying that it's easy to fall into the trap of thi

We could argue about how many orders of magnitude, but I agree. It's absolutely easier in some ways. I'm just saying that it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that EC2 (or whoever) is abstracted away from hardware failure/geographic problems when it definitely isn't. http://arstechnica.com/business/2011/09/google-devops-and-disaster-porn/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2011/09/google-devops-and-di... is a bit overdramatized but the final section is a great summary of real stuff you need to think about on EC2, or any other provider. Again, I know you're not minimizing these issues, but some people certainly do.