How I use the good parts of AWS
I am in agreement with everything generally except for CloudFormation and setting up Route53 zones manually.I use Terraform to setup my infrastructure as service on AWS, including Route53 zones.After the latest 0.12 upgrade to the language, Terraform is quite a bit more user friendly than CloudFormation, and importantly, not locked down to just Amazon -- it supports multiple clouds and on-premises solutions for declarative orchestration of resources.