AWS: the good, the bad and the ugly
This is a great writeup and is completely on target for realistic deployments on AWS.We're a big user of AWS (well, relative, but we run about $10K/month in costs through AWS), so I'd like to supplement this outstanding blog post:* I cannot emphasize enough how awesome Amazon's cost cuts are.  It is really nice to wake up in the morning and see that 40% of your costs are now going to drop 20% next month going forward.  (Like: Recent S3 cost cuts).  In Louisiana, we call this Lagniappe (A little something extra.)  We don't plan for it, nor budget for it, so it is a nice surprise every time it happens.* We've also completely abandoned EBS in favor of ephemeral storage except in two places:  some NFS and MySQL slaves that function as snapshot/backup hosts only.* If the data you are storing isn't super critical, consider Amazon S3's reduced redundancy storage.  When you approach the 30-50TB level, it makes a difference in costs.* RDS is still just a dream for us, since we still don't have a comfort level with performance.* Elasticache has definitely been a winner and allowed us to replace our dedicated memcache instances.* We're doing some initial testing with Route 53 (Amazon's DNS services) and so far so good, with great flexibility and a nice API into DNS.* We're scared to death of AWS SNS - we currently use SendGrid and a long trusted existing server for email delivery.  Twillo will is our first choice for an upcoming SMS alerting project.* If you are doing anything with streaming or high bandwidth work, AWS bandwidth is VERY expensive.  We've opted to go with unmetered ports on a cluster of bare metal boxes with 1000TB.com.  That easily saves us $1000's  a month in bandwidth costs, and if we need overflow or have an outage there we can spin up temporary instances on AWS to provide short term coverage.