why not outsource your OS management and use shared hosting, engine yard or appengine? hardware guys willing to do the work of amazon can be had for very little money, even on a short-term contract basis.
there are situations where different levels of outsourcing are appropriate. And certainly, if your cost per compute node doesn't matter, few will fault you for going with amazon. But you should be aware that you are paying for that, and in some situations, having a high cost per compute unit will kill you.
This is a fair question, so I don't see why it should be downvoted.
The reason outsourcing hardware to AWS or Rackspace makes sense versus hiring hardware guys (usually) doesn't is that you introduce one more link in your failure chain. In My opinion it is far, far more likely that you and your hardware guy are going to mess up ZFS configuration somehow and have it fail when your app gets black swan traffic than Amazon going down. When it comes to Engine Yard, I'm all for that too, in the right circumstances, but you get fairly high lock in. I agree that you get that with AWS too, it just seems more likely that AWS will be around 10 years than it does Engine Yard. But sure, Engine Yard and Heroku are great.
filesystem user error can be just as deadly on aws as it can on your own hardware. either way, you need good backups.
While I agree that amazon itself is unlikely enough to go down that you can pretty much bet the company on it, any one server at amazon may go down at any time. Now, amazon has the huge advantage of being able to give you another server at any time, but you need to be prepared for that. any data on your local disk would be gone, and you need to be able to re-connect to your EBS store from only one instance. (many, many of the 'admin error' cases of data loss i've seen stemmed from mounting a network block device read/write on two different servers without a clustered file system.)
My point is just that amazon doesn't free you from the need for (and mistakes of) *NIX admins (like heroku, app engine and engine yard should.)
That's a good point - you could argue it doesn't free you from the need of a good admin, and it actually makes it more difficult to hire someone who knows what they are doing; good cloud SA skills are much more rare than good traditional SA skills.
When you can just drive to the datacenter and toss in some more disks or drop your new F5 on there (or hack it together with CARP), but instead have to be familiar with exactly what the restrictions and use cases around the cloud providers offerings are; the field of candidates just got painfully smaller, and probably more expensive.
Heroku and Engine Yard (for their cloud service) are just front ends to AWS anyway. Your basically paying them for the luxury of not having to deal with AWS. So as long as they don't get undercut by a competitor and all their customers flee, they should be around for a while. That or their owners get greedy, sell the companies, and the new owners move to "more economical hosting". Na, that never happens. ;-)
right. Just like you are paying AWS for the luxury of not having to deal with hardware.
Both can be rational decisions (or not, depending on many factors) I'm just pointing out that the people who deal with racking and stacking (the sort that amazon allows you to fire) are rather a lot less expensive than Linux SysAdmins, the sort who app engine, heroku and engine yard allow you to fire.
there are situations where different levels of outsourcing are appropriate. And certainly, if your cost per compute node doesn't matter, few will fault you for going with amazon. But you should be aware that you are paying for that, and in some situations, having a high cost per compute unit will kill you.