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If you're making a fairly standard webapp, what does it provide you that, e.g. softlayer or linode does not? How much of AWS' popularity come from it just bein

by m0th87 13y ago

If you're making a fairly standard webapp, what does it provide you that, e.g. softlayer or linode does not? How much of AWS' popularity come from it just being a safe choice, like a cloud version of "No One Ever Got Fired for Buying IBM"?

threeseed 13y ago
Firstly AWS sets the benchmark for security, transparency and compliance which we know you won't get from Linode for example. Secondly AWS has a damn good network. Thirdly lots of software 'understands' EC2 e.g. Cassandra, Hazelcast. AWS' popularity comes not just from the wide array of decent, well integrated and cohesive services e.g. S3, SQS, ELB, ElastiCache but also all of the third party services that are hosted within the AWS network e.g. MongoHQ, IronMQ/IronIO. AWS is very much an ecosystem. If you are building a new app from scratch there a lot of benefits to having others manage the commodity parts of your infrastructure.
adventured 13y ago
Well I think my point was exactly that: if you're building a fairly standard site / service / app, you absolutely do not have any practical reason to use AWS, particularly if you have a modest budget. The radical majority (99.999%?) of all sites on the web can easily be run by a cheap dedicated server. And I'm not talking Softlayer, which itself is expensive in the world of dedicated hosts; there are several better priced providers that are nearly as good as Softlayer. EC2 is never going to appeal to the bottom 99% of the web, until their prices come way down (and Amazon may never care about that). Dedicated hosts will keep offering more and more ooomph per dollar. The demands on a typical site in the US market (prime AWS customers currently) are not going up much per year at this point, as web usage is no longer growing much for the first world. Meanwhile hardware and bandwidth for an average dedicated server just keep getting better. Services that used to cost me $300 to $500 / month to run four or five years ago, I can now operate for 1/3 that price on even more powerful dedicated servers.

by m0th87 13y ago

threeseed 13y ago

Firstly AWS sets the benchmark for security, transparency and compliance which we know you won't get from Linode for example. Secondly AWS has a damn good network. Thirdly lots of software 'understands' EC2 e.g. Cassandra, Hazelcast. AWS' popularity comes not just from the wide array of decent, well integrated and cohesive services e.g. S3, SQS, ELB, ElastiCache but also all of the third party services that are hosted within the AWS network e.g. MongoHQ, IronMQ/IronIO. AWS is very much an ecosystem. If you are building a new app from scratch there a lot of benefits to having others manage the commodity parts of your infrastructure.

adventured 13y ago

Well I think my point was exactly that: if you're building a fairly standard site / service / app, you absolutely do not have any practical reason to use AWS, particularly if you have a modest budget. The radical majority (99.999%?) of all sites on the web can easily be run by a cheap dedicated server. And I'm not talking Softlayer, which itself is expensive in the world of dedicated hosts; there are several better priced providers that are nearly as good as Softlayer. EC2 is never going to appeal to the bottom 99% of the web, until their prices come way down (and Amazon may never care about that). Dedicated hosts will keep offering more and more ooomph per dollar. The demands on a typical site in the US market (prime AWS customers currently) are not going up much per year at this point, as web usage is no longer growing much for the first world. Meanwhile hardware and bandwidth for an average dedicated server just keep getting better. Services that used to cost me $300 to $500 / month to run four or five years ago, I can now operate for 1/3 that price on even more powerful dedicated servers.