Amazon Web Services for startups

It has been almost a year since I first wrote about Amazon Web Services as a way to out-source your infrastructure. Two of the companies I work with have been using AWS for either their primary infrastructure or as a way to quickly build test configurations. The results have been terrific and low cost!

Today's WSJ has a good article that summarizes the experiences of several other startups in using AWS to provide their back end infrastructure and it's well worth a read. You can find the WSJ article here.

AWS isn't a plug and play solution for your infrastructure needs – it's like furniture that comes with "some assembly required". Tasks such as load balancing, dealing with bringing up new servers, recovering when a server goes down etc are left up to you.

That said, the ability to have a redundant data center that is managed 24/7 with high availability at a rate you can charge to your credit card is very compelling. For early stage companies this is a huge benefit and one that you shouldn't pass up!

Comments

[Fred]

Sounds like incorporating Amazon into your business could be a good thing.