Lots of comments about EC2's price. My personal experience is that we do not just pay for the computing power of EC2 but the productivity it offers: it's just magical that one can launch an availability group across multiple zones, set up its autoscaling rules, and let it run wild. Netflix used to build its platform on top of EC2s, and the result was that a single engineer can carry a pager for multiple services 24x7, stateful included, and still enjoyed great work-life balance. It's also amazing how hard it is for companies to replicate their own EC2 in their own data centers.