Item — HN Reader

The above is why I love to read HN...

However, it seems that at some point here you are better off going back to getting dedicated hosts at a couple different distributed data centers and dealing with the complexity yourself. Surely by the time you "get to 11", you are spending more to be on AWS than doing it yourself would cost?

1 comments

If anything, I suspect that the opposite is the case. If you're planning to set up servers in data centers on opposite sides of the globe, AWS is great. This is where their abstraction layer pays off. All their regions work the same way, accept the same API calls, are backed by effectively the same hardware. Get your setup working in one region, then copy a few S3 buckets over, change the --region argument to some calls in your script, and suddenly you're up in Singapore.

Plus, Amazon is building tools, like the above-mentioned Route 53, to support just this use case.

Now, those of us who have worked a lot within one AWS region will complain and moan about the horror of trying to work cross-region, but that's not because AWS makes cross-region unusually hard. It's because they make your work within one region unusually easy. We're all spoiled by, e.g., the magic of cloning EBS volumes from zone to zone via snapshots. (Well, okay, it's magical when it's working, anyway. ;)