7 ms·

Plus seamless integration with everything else AWS.

click170 12y ago
You should be aware though that integrating with AWS services that aren't also provided by AWS' competition, you're increasing the cost of switching away from AWS in the future. I'm not saying don't do it, I'm just saying be aware that you may be making it harder for your company to change providers down the road.
- johansch 12y ago
  Exactly. I would think very, very, very hard about building something on top of any AWS technologies for which there are no good open substitutes of.
  - sseveran 12y ago
    Why wouldn't you take advantage of everything your platform gives you? This goes for your OS as well as your infrastructure.
    - johansch 12y ago
      Because you want to avoid locking your future with one particular service supplier. Particularly one that charges so much (for e.g. bandwidth) as AWS.
      - meltedice 12y ago
        Still cheaper than what google charges for bandwidth.
        johansch 12y ago
        Might be. It's still 10-20x the market price.
    - rev_bird 12y ago
      As far as I know, the biggest reason not to rely unconditionally on AWS-specific offerings is the same reason to avoid vendor lock-in elsewhere: They've got you over a barrel when it comes time to re-negotiate pricing. Amazon has a pretty wonderful history of price cuts, but when Google comes in with a better deal (or you want to hedge your bets with a hybrid cloud-type thing), it's waaay harder to find analogues of things like Kinesis and SES and Elastic Beanstalk. There are definitely some PaaS-type offerings they have that aren't as scary (RDS/MySQL, for example, and ElastiCache/Memcached, etc.), but if you're trying to bounce systems between clouds, or deploy the exact same configuration everywhere you're running, the only real answer is to rely on compute resources (basically EC2) and build your own stuff. All the clouds have Linux servers.
      - eropple 12y ago
        I agree with your general point, but switching between Kinesis and Kafka isn't too crazy. SES can be replaced by Mailgun, Postmark, so on and so forth. The AWS services I use without hesitation are EC2, Route 53, S3, SNS (to mobile devices, not to my applications), and SES. RDS and ElastiCache can be okay for early, pre-scaling situations, and Dynamo is okay for proving out a problem before cranking out a Cassandra cluster (but I wouldn't want to scale on Dynamo, gets real pricey real fast). I will also heavily recommend Redshift, because it's fantastic for a lot of different offline workflows and it's a lot nicer than maintaining your own. It works well without being tied to AWS for your actual infrastructure.
  - untog 12y ago
    It's a trade-off. As far as I am aware, there is nothing out there that can rival the cost and functionality of S3. I'm not going to avoid using it simply because there is a lack of open alternative - it's that much better that I will use it now and redevelop to use different technology if and when I have to. After all, most of these services all have pre-made client libraries. Rewriting code to use a different service isn't likely to be world-shattering.
    - johansch 12y ago
      I think your own cluster of for-rent machines would outperform the price performance of S3 wildly. Using e.g. Riak or something similar. (I haven't done this particular pricing calculation, but everything else in AWS seems awfully overpriced, so why not S3?)
      - saryant 12y ago
        But then I have to maintain a Riak cluster.
        johansch 12y ago
        For all means, if you have LOTS more money than time, you should pay someone else to do this. Outside of certain sheltered silicon valley startups, this is often not the case though. :)
        eropple 12y ago
        You know, I'm pretty sure that almost everyone is better off spending a few cents per gigabyte per month on S3 for inert file storage, a functionality that's performance-inelastic except at the far end of the curve, than maintaining a Riak cluster. Source: I've maintained a Riak cluster. There are lots of AWS services I avoid (I won't use SQS, I won't use Dynamo except during prototyping, etc.), but S3 is so utterly portable across any cloud you go to (and latency is already not something you are worrying about if you're using S3) that it's laughable to suggest that you're going to roll your own with anywhere near the reliability at anywhere near the cost.
  - deleted 12y ago
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- deleted 12y ago
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You should be aware though that integrating with AWS services that aren't also provided by AWS' competition, you're increasing the cost of switching away from AWS in the future. I'm not saying don't do it, I'm just saying be aware that you may be making it harder for your company to change providers down the road.

johansch 12y ago
Exactly. I would think very, very, very hard about building something on top of any AWS technologies for which there are no good open substitutes of.
- sseveran 12y ago
  Why wouldn't you take advantage of everything your platform gives you? This goes for your OS as well as your infrastructure.
  - johansch 12y ago
    Because you want to avoid locking your future with one particular service supplier. Particularly one that charges so much (for e.g. bandwidth) as AWS.
    - meltedice 12y ago
      Still cheaper than what google charges for bandwidth.
      - johansch 12y ago
        Might be. It's still 10-20x the market price.
  - rev_bird 12y ago
    As far as I know, the biggest reason not to rely unconditionally on AWS-specific offerings is the same reason to avoid vendor lock-in elsewhere: They've got you over a barrel when it comes time to re-negotiate pricing. Amazon has a pretty wonderful history of price cuts, but when Google comes in with a better deal (or you want to hedge your bets with a hybrid cloud-type thing), it's waaay harder to find analogues of things like Kinesis and SES and Elastic Beanstalk. There are definitely some PaaS-type offerings they have that aren't as scary (RDS/MySQL, for example, and ElastiCache/Memcached, etc.), but if you're trying to bounce systems between clouds, or deploy the exact same configuration everywhere you're running, the only real answer is to rely on compute resources (basically EC2) and build your own stuff. All the clouds have Linux servers.
    - eropple 12y ago
      I agree with your general point, but switching between Kinesis and Kafka isn't too crazy. SES can be replaced by Mailgun, Postmark, so on and so forth. The AWS services I use without hesitation are EC2, Route 53, S3, SNS (to mobile devices, not to my applications), and SES. RDS and ElastiCache can be okay for early, pre-scaling situations, and Dynamo is okay for proving out a problem before cranking out a Cassandra cluster (but I wouldn't want to scale on Dynamo, gets real pricey real fast). I will also heavily recommend Redshift, because it's fantastic for a lot of different offline workflows and it's a lot nicer than maintaining your own. It works well without being tied to AWS for your actual infrastructure.
- untog 12y ago
  It's a trade-off. As far as I am aware, there is nothing out there that can rival the cost and functionality of S3. I'm not going to avoid using it simply because there is a lack of open alternative - it's that much better that I will use it now and redevelop to use different technology if and when I have to. After all, most of these services all have pre-made client libraries. Rewriting code to use a different service isn't likely to be world-shattering.
  - johansch 12y ago
    I think your own cluster of for-rent machines would outperform the price performance of S3 wildly. Using e.g. Riak or something similar. (I haven't done this particular pricing calculation, but everything else in AWS seems awfully overpriced, so why not S3?)
    - saryant 12y ago
      But then I have to maintain a Riak cluster.
      - johansch 12y ago
        For all means, if you have LOTS more money than time, you should pay someone else to do this. Outside of certain sheltered silicon valley startups, this is often not the case though. :)
        eropple 12y ago
        You know, I'm pretty sure that almost everyone is better off spending a few cents per gigabyte per month on S3 for inert file storage, a functionality that's performance-inelastic except at the far end of the curve, than maintaining a Riak cluster. Source: I've maintained a Riak cluster. There are lots of AWS services I avoid (I won't use SQS, I won't use Dynamo except during prototyping, etc.), but S3 is so utterly portable across any cloud you go to (and latency is already not something you are worrying about if you're using S3) that it's laughable to suggest that you're going to roll your own with anywhere near the reliability at anywhere near the cost.
- deleted 12y ago
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deleted 12y ago
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