A lot of comments in this thread are voicing concerns over the marketed cost&#x2F;performance benefits of AWS and the reliability of their services in the case of region failure e.g. the API services goes down.<p>But are there benefits to using Amazon&#x27;s more high-level services such as SQS and SNS which, supposedly, replicate their configuration state and data across multiple regions, in terms of reliability?<p>For instance, on a per-instance basis AWS might be more expensive than a bare-metal provider, and there&#x27;s nothing to stop you running your own RabbitMQ instance. But SQS messages are replicated across three regions, so if you were building an equivalent service you&#x27;d need three instances in different regions and a reliable distributed message queue.<p>So does that additional complexity&#x2F;cost make SQS at all worthwhile? Or does it come down to the fact that, while your own hand-rolled service would require more management, your potential message throughput at a given cost would be much higher than with SQS?