> Do you ever regret being locked in to a hosting provider? > Does it restrict your ability to develop locally? No, we use Vagrant so that we can run our docke

> Do you ever regret being locked in to a hosting provider? > Does it restrict your ability to develop locally? No, we use Vagrant so that we can run our docker cluster either locally or on Amazon. We have stubbed alternatives for all AWS services, including SNS and SQS, allowing us to run the entire backend locally even without an internet connection. > Have you been bitten by problems that you can't resolve because you don't own the product? I'd say its kind of like coding in Ruby on Rails. If you are bit by a problem you can't resolve there is a high chance you are doing something wrong, or at least not the "one true way". Sometimes we have issues when exploring the edges of what is possible on the AWS ecosystem (we've been using the fresh-out-of-beta ECS, and running into a lot of limits there), but generally the basic stuff like S3, SNS, SQS, Elasticache, etc just works, and doesn't require any attention. It's just a working, hands off gear in your system. > Do you pretty much just love it? Sure. It's a lot better than racking physical hardware, and the deep integration between things like autoscaling groups, EC2, ELB, etc makes it easy to automate all the things. In the end the more our service is a machine that can run itself and repair itself (replacing its own instances as needed) the more I love it.