I'm always extra-skeptical about devs who choose to use click-baity titles to explain why a widely used piece infrastructure is useless. The merits and demerits of AWS have been discussed in depth by folks with way more experience and knowledge than this author, and in most cases "Never Use Amazon" would be found as a laughable conclusion.<p>Nevertheless, I hope AWS reads this to get an idea about how they still need to improve their accessibility and image as a company overall. It's completely true that the transparency and accuracy of the "status page" is terrible because no product team wants to admit something went wrong. It's also true that their Premium Support is constantly overwhelmed and often not incredibly useful but still essential for many cases (This basically boils down to them having huge turnover rate, a low number of people who actually have skills to do the high-level support, and having too many ways to "game" the system where customers who spend nearly nothing get away with taking way too much support time and substituting paying actual architects with constant support cases. Increasing cost of support would actually be the best move here.) Regardless, this plays into the narrative that I've always observed. AWS, despite being easy to get going with, is also incredibly easy to mess up. The fact that there is a certification system spanning so many different parts of AWS should go to show the disconnect between how much AWS actually expects you to master before using it, and how much the average dev really wants to learn before jumping in (reading a blog post is not gonna cut it.)
Why is bare metal so "uncool"? I am certain that a lot of companies don't need the flexibility provided by AWS. I can understand that you don't need additional staff by going with the AWS route, but in the end you get a bare vm which is kinda similar to a bare metal server – you have to manage it yourself. Things like RDS isn't good idea anyways, let it be in the startup phase (expensive) or later on (inflexible, etc.)... The only service I could think of which is really helpful is SES, because handling email is very stressful.<p>And even if you need the flexibility you can still run your predictable stuff on bare metal, while, when the traffic spikes, spin on some cloud servers as you need them. But things like load balancing are always better handled on own servers, where you actually know what the fuck is happening.
> "Unfortunately, our infrastructure on AWS is working "<p>> "I learned recently that we are a profitable company, more so than I thought. Looking at the top 10 companies by revenue per employee, we’d be in the top 10."<p>Congratulations. You just convinced me to go with AWS
Let me tell you the different between use bare metal and use AWS, as current my position in a startup, I am the only developer, our system includes more than three services for two different type of users and admin. I coded all these services and put them online within 2.5 months, and all these possible is because I use AWS. There is no way if I use bare metal. (I have been there before)<p>If you truly understand how to design your system in cloud infrastructure fashion rather than try to manage the way to use a cloud infrastructure as a bare metal, then, you can have a really long term benefits.
Most instance types you can launch with ephemeral disk that is local SSD. All recent generation servers are like this. m3s, etc. You don't need to launch an i2. There are a lot, lot of problems with this article.
> AWS Premium Support is mandatory<p>This is simply not true. We only pay 49/mo for support. Sure, you can pay for the top-level which starts at 15k/month but it is <i>not</i> mandatory.<p>The biggest item I'd mention to you is learn to use spot instances. I doubt Google can beat my 2 cents an hour for m3.large servers.
I have not used AWS a LOT, but I have used it some, and did run into issues with throttling CPU and what at least seemed like random times (after some quota of cycles reached or something?). That did not happen on Linode and Digital Ocean. I cannot verify that this type of thing happens for network and larger instances but I believe him if he says it does.<p>I'm guessing their philosophy is to be more strict so they can predict and ensure they will have available resources to spread around.<p>For me, AWS has some things like VPCs, S3, DynamoDB, etc. that are hard to get unless you go with something like GCE and not available in VPS provider like Linode and Digital Ocean. So far I have found the smaller simpler providers to be a much better deal and generally to perform better for the same or less money. If I need those other features though then I would have to use an AWS or GCE.
To me, the difference between GCE and AWS really has to do with "openness": while I do admit GCE machines can be faster and cheaper, you only feel like you are treated somewhat equally as the big corps when using AWS.<p>For example, Lambda has been released to the general public for quite some time, while on the other hand, Google Cloud Function is still in invite-only phase.<p>I do love Google, they are building many awesome products(personally Chromebook is my favourite computing device now, if only I don't have the tech requirements that is only doable on a Mac -_-), but when it comes to GCE, it really gives one the sense that they are only aiming at big corporations right now, for small startups or individuals doing side project, AWS is significantly better. For me, this is an advantage even tho I have to sacrifice a little performance
The article conveniently ignores things like the number of services available, the ability to find staff who are familiar with the platform, the availability of data centres in your location, the depth/breadth of the available APIs, market share and so on ... Sure, if the only thing that you care about is cost, maybe you should use GCE. Alternatively, if you're really serious about saving money, then perhaps you should buy some second hand servers and host it yourself.
You would think that the author would have learned his lesson after all the bad experiences with the (Amazon) cloud, but no: his solution is to go to another cloud provider. And even then, GCE? If the author requires insight into system performance and the ability to debug, then Joyent is the place to go to, not GCE or anyone else.<p>I do not understand these people, nor do I purport to: a half-decent, 32GB of memory, 4 TB internal disk, octo core intel system (made by intel) costs around $1,800 USD, that is a one time cost, plus recurring electricity costs. Meanwhile, the author's company pays $1,500 just in monthly reservation costs. What ever happened to "keep it simple, stupid!" UNIX principle?<p>From the article:<p>"<i>We have to comply to a few regulations so we have a few dedicated options here and there. It’s 10% on top of the instance price (plus a $1500 fixed monthly fee per region).</i>"
"Paying guarantees a 24h SLA to get a reply to a limit ticket. The free tiers might have to wait for a week (maybe more), being unable to work in the meantime. It is an absurd yet very real reason pushing for premium support."<p>Not my experience.