As a startup guy and recovering sysadmin, I really admire the Amazon Web Services effort. It started out small and ugly, but they have marched ever onward, slowly improving things and adding new features. Five years of steady plodding can get you pretty far.

I guess we'll take that as a compliment. I thought that we were racing, not plodding, but I must live in an AWS-induced time dilation field.

It's entirely meant as a compliment. There's no way I want an infrastructure supplier to seem hurried. Internally it may have seemed as fast as possible, but externally it was never showed signs of being faster than possible, which is an amazing achievement. For our industry, almost miraculous.

And I think you folks were very smart to start small and improve incrementally. As an example of what I mean, take this Slashdot comment from the EC2 launch a few years back: http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=329797&ci...

Those are all legitimate gripes, and one by one Amazon has knocked them all down. Had you tried solving all of the problems before launching, I imagine you never would have gotten anywhere. The steady pace and it's-ready-when-it's-ready releases are definitely inspiring to me.

I'm always very impressed with the continues release of awesome features. I'd love to see your roadmap! Just knowing that, whatever you need or desire, AWS will probably release it at some point soon-ish, is awesome.

$68.40/month seems a bit high to me

Yeah, you may as well just run an EC2 node with memcached on it...

Except running memcached on an EC2 instance is not equivalent to the ElastiCache offering. With ElastiCache you are paying for a redundant, managed service that can be scaled and monitored through a few clicks of a webpage or API.

Outsourcing these type of things is potentially justifiable to a developer whose wallet is full and many hats touch the ceiling.

In what way is ElastiCache redundant?

> In addition, Amazon ElastiCache automatically detects and replaces failed Cache Nodes, providing a resilient system that mitigates the risk of overloaded databases, which slow website and application load times.

Or membase, which gives you storage-backing and TAP protocol to do things like fetching all keys.

$68.40/month is the price for the smallest instance with only 1.3 GB. The biggest instance with 68 GB costs $1,612.80 per month.

now I want my elastic mongo and cassandra and we are all set.

That is pretty pricey. 1GB of RAM from crucial is $10. 1 GB of Memcache from AWS, (assuming 3 year amortization) $1900.

Obviously there is overhead, but if you have machines already and they are not maxed out on RAM then the $10/GB price is not far of the real cost.