3 ms·
Article author here. So, you're right that while AWS does continue to lower prices, they're still not the cheapest game in town. Frankly, they're not even nec
by joshpadnick 12y ago
Article author here. So, you're right that while AWS does continue to lower prices, they're still not the cheapest game in town. Frankly, they're not even necessarily the most performant game in town.
What they are really competing on is breadth and depth of service. The article goes into a lot of those services, but, as one example, if you launch an instance in EC2 you can allow it to access secured buckets in S3 without any need to store keys/passwords on the instance itself thanks to IAM roles.
Another example is services like AWS Lambda, which is a hosted way to run a function without any need to manage servers.
The list goes on and on...direct VPN connectivity, Hosted Active Directory, CloudHSM. While I'm biased, my perception is that AWS is pretty far ahead of the pack.
- artifaxx 12y agoThanks for all the replies. I am just researching all of this for my own startup and it is important to understand all the tradeoffs. And it is clear from your article that AWS has a very deep feature set. Its a good article!
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- joshpadnick 12y agoThank you!
- seunosewa 12y agoBut do you need the features? Are they important enough to be worth getting locked into an expensive ecosystem over? Look at Reddit, they have very few employees yet they can't make a profit because their hosting costs are massive. Contrast them with StackExchange, which uses a small number of powerful, well-optimized servers and is very profitable.
- seunosewa 12y agoActually, technically, StackExchange is not profitable yet: (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2015/01/20.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2015/01/20.html). However, "We could just slow down our insane hiring pace and get profitable right now, but it would mean foregoing some of the investments that let us help more developers."
- gtaylor 12y agoWas that Hosted Active Directory from one of the marketplace AMIs, or are they offering this as a built-in service now?
- pjwal 12y agoI think that's spot on, it is all of the bells and whistles along with a fairly predictable management cost, even if you are new to AWS, that make it a safe choice for a big swath of the market. Kudos to you for touching on containerization, I would just like to add that the many emerging platforms and tools (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B33GFtNCUAE-vEX.png:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B33GFtNCUAE-vEX.png:large) are rapidly starting to provide an alternative to AWS that was not there before in their ability to realize more competitively priced hosting alternatives without sacrificing on administrative overhead.