Does anyone have experience working with Amazon's AWS cloud service for your apps? Is it easy to set up and reliable/low latency, etc? I currently use offsite dedicated servers and am looking to utilize something like this. Any insight/feedback is greatly appreciated. Thx
If you're curious but are concerned about price, I recommend trying the Amazon Free Tier service. Our company uses their micro instance for offsite backup and simple batch processing, and it's more or less free unless we go over their quotas, which is not often. You'll pay more if you need more horsepower, but for backend-type processes the micro instance does just fine. You can host a database, operating system, and a VM, at minimum.
Yeah, I am looking at the tier 1 service just to a) figure it out and b) see how reliable it is. Right now I am running 2 servers offsite in different locations and would like to see how, if at all, I could reduce some of that overhead (administrative and otherwise). I know it can be expensive if you are going all out, full bore, etc, but some of the stuff I need the offsite for are as a backup to the local servers and data storage. Reliability is the key thing, tho.
We haven't had much in the way of reliability problems. The only problem we've had is running CPU-intensive applications on the free tier - primarily because of the RAM limitations (about 650MB). We host a backup on AWS-EBS, but there, again, you're limited to 10GB. Just depends on the size and scope of your system.