A Comprehensive Guide to Building a Scalable Web App on AWS

Re:A Comprehensive Guide to Building a Scalable Web App on AWS by joshpadnick on Wednesday January 21, 2015 @07:19PM (#8926709)

Article author here. So, you're right that while AWS does continue to lower prices, they're still not the cheapest game in town. Frankly, they're not even necessarily the most performant game in town.

What they are really competing on is breadth and depth of service. The article goes into a lot of those services, but, as one example, if you launch an instance in EC2 you can allow it to access secured buckets in S3 without any need to store keys/passwords on the instance itself thanks to IAM roles.

Another example is services like AWS Lambda, which is a hosted way to run a function without any need to manage servers.

The list goes on and on...direct VPN connectivity, Hosted Active Directory, CloudHSM. While I'm biased, my perception is that AWS is pretty far ahead of the pack.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Comprehensive Guide to Building a Scalable Web App on AWS by artifaxx on Wednesday January 21, 2015 @07:23PM (#8926724)

Thanks for all the replies. I am just researching all of this for my own startup and it is important to understand all the tradeoffs. And it is clear from your article that AWS has a very deep feature set. Its a good article!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Comprehensive Guide to Building a Scalable Web App on AWS by seunosewa on Thursday January 22, 2015 @07:07AM (#8928709)

But do you need the features? Are they important enough to be worth getting locked into an expensive ecosystem over?

Look at Reddit, they have very few employees yet they can't make a profit because their hosting costs are massive.

Contrast them with StackExchange, which uses a small number of powerful, well-optimized servers and is very profitable.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Comprehensive Guide to Building a Scalable Web App on AWS by seunosewa on Thursday January 22, 2015 @01:00PM (#8930589)

Actually, technically, StackExchange is not profitable yet: (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2015/01/20.html). However, "We could just slow down our insane hiring pace and get profitable right now, but it would mean foregoing some of the investments that let us help more developers."

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Comprehensive Guide to Building a Scalable Web App on AWS by joshpadnick on Wednesday January 21, 2015 @08:38PM (#8927005)

Thank you!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Comprehensive Guide to Building a Scalable Web App on AWS by pjwal on Thursday January 22, 2015 @03:01AM (#8928067)

I think that's spot on, it is all of the bells and whistles along with a fairly predictable management cost, even if you are new to AWS, that make it a safe choice for a big swath of the market.

Kudos to you for touching on containerization, I would just like to add that the many emerging platforms and tools (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B33GFtNCUAE-vEX.png:large) are rapidly starting to provide an alternative to AWS that was not there before in their ability to realize more competitively priced hosting alternatives without sacrificing on administrative overhead.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Comprehensive Guide to Building a Scalable Web App on AWS by gtaylor on Wednesday January 21, 2015 @09:04PM (#8927098)

Was that Hosted Active Directory from one of the marketplace AMIs, or are they offering this as a built-in service now?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Comprehensive Guide to Building a Scalable Web App on AWS by jdub on Wednesday January 21, 2015 @09:59PM (#8927302)

Directory Service is basically Samba as a service, very good for a lot of use cases: http://aws.amazon.com/directoryservice/

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Comprehensive Guide to Building a Scalable Web App on AWS by gtaylor on Thursday January 22, 2015 @04:30PM (#8931871)

wow, I don't know how I missed this before. Thanks!

[ Parent | on HN ]