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I have been asking, and wondering why would anyone want to use AWS. It is insanely expensive. It is Slow on CPU, Slow on I/O, Low on Bandwidth, Low on memory, and Zero Support. Compared to many other alternatives that gives you 3 – 4 times the on all the above plus better support for the same price. Even their High CPU and Memory plan is still on the expensive side, only the High I/O SSD offers some value. AWS works great when you are in the mid range of expanding, then you can calculate your usage and book their server in advance using Reserved Instances. Instagram and Netflix as example. But that is hassle you have to put though, there are alternatives that are priced and perform just as well without using Reserved Instances. And once you got past the mid range, a managed dedicated server and some instant cloud severs should be much more cost effective.

Apart from being forced by VC ( because they are heavily invested in Amazon ) i could not understand why startup are choosing AWS at all.

3 comments

You're generalizing too much if you believe that the whole AWS stack is bad.

S3 is very reliable, and I'm not aware of anything as reliable (we're talking eleven nines)/simple/cheap/distributed.

EC2 gives you the ability to manage instances in several continents with a dead simple API, which is unheard of anywhere else at this price.

ELB is very reliable, simple to use, and saves you hours of setup.

My point is that if you really wonder why anyone would want to use AWS, you might not be considering AWS, but only EC2, and in a very non-international way.

Arh. I should have written EC2. Sorry for the confusion. ( Will double check next time before i make a post ) I do realize there is other AWS services that are great and simple to use. But for hosting i dont think anyone should choose EC2.

We use AWS (and with great satisfaction) because it provides a full offering. We don't just need a bunch of servers, we also need databases, one or more queues, backup storage, caching and so forth. AWS provides all of these services, offers one (reasonably clear) dashboard for them and makes it insanely easy to get them all running and tied together. As for the Zero Support thing: our experience is that it is quite easy to get support from people at Amazon. I've been emailing extensively with one of their platform architects which was actually a very nice experience.

I have been asking, and wondering why would anyone want to use AWS

It's dead-simple to get started.

It's widely known. I can convince my CTO to use Amazon for cloud-hosting. He's never heard of Rackspace or Joylent - people who are serious about running their infrastructure on the cloud will research and know about them but for quick experimenting and companies just getting their feet wet, Amazon has a big edge here.