Foreword

This story relates my experience at a typical web startup. We are running hundreds of instances on AWS, and we’ve been doing so for some time, growing at a sustained pace.

Our full operation is in the cloud: webservers, databases, micro-services, git, wiki, BI tools, monitoring… That includes everything a typical tech company needs to operate.

We have a few switches and a router left in the office to provide internet access and that’s all, no servers on-site.

The following highlights many issues encountered day to day on AWS so that [hopefully] you don’t do the same mistakes we’ve done by picking AWS.

What does the cloud provide?

There are a lot of clouds: GCE, AWS, Azure, Digital Ocean, RackSpace, SoftLayer, OVH, GoDaddy… Check out our article Choosing a Cloud Provider: AWS vs GCE vs SoftLayer vs DigitalOcean vs …

We’ll focus only on GCE and AWS in this…