1. Agreed. IAM is really, really, nice, and I find myself missing it greatly when I'm on other platforms. 2. We use quite a few more things than EC2 for our s

1. Agreed. IAM is really, really, nice, and I find myself missing it greatly when I'm on other platforms. 2. We use quite a few more things than EC2 for our systems. - SQS eliminates the need to build / manage a queuing system. - DynamoDB/SimpleDB eliminate the need to build / manage a distributed data store. - OpsWorks eliminates the need for a DevOps team (mostly). - ELB eliminates the need to build / manage a load balancer. - SES seamlessly takes care of out-bound mail. - Direct Connect gives us a way to extend our DC tools into the "cloud". - And to top it all off, I can bring up any/all of these services at a moments notice, run some experiments, and then shut them down when I'm done. I don't think there are very many vendors that can help us do these things with this much flexibility. Yea, AWS can be expensive, but we feel like its worth it.