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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.

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.