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Comment by wikiburner | Hacker News Reader

That's funny, I was just reading this blog post from Adrian Holovaty on some of the issues he ran into with deploying Python/Django on Heroku and how great AWS has worked out for him with Soundslice:

http://www.holovaty.com/writing/aws-notes/

He just about had me sold.

Anyway, I'm definitely in the wanting to avoid sysadmin stuff if at all possible camp. Does anyone have any thoughts on AWS vs Heroku for Django? Does Adrian's solution seem reasonable?

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DevOps/Sysadmin here. If you want to avoid the DevOps pain use Heroku until you run into its pain points, and then migrate to AWS (or even Digital Ocean, if you don't need S3, elastic load balancers, etc).

Most developers should have no problem in AWS for small to midsize environments until you're scaling up.

It depends! If you're planning to go a year out with your startup, then I think you should invest sometime into Amazon and set it up with chef.

Mi main concern is about keep well & alive the database (postgres). I can do the app server but the data server is the one that scary me ;)

RDS recently added cross region snapshot copies, and more importantly, cross region replication for at least MySQL. Those were the last two features I was waiting for to jump to RDS. In fact, I was in the process of setting up cross region backups using just the cross region snapshot copy when they released the new cross region read replicas feature.

I'm very much looking forward to moving our manually managed cross data center MySQL replication/admin to RDS. But I also don't have to scale MySQL to ridiculous levels either, I just need very high availability.

AWS does not get rid of the need for a sysadmin; just the need for someone who can physically access the box.

An EC2 instance still requires someone to set it up, install packages, button up security issues, deploy configurations & applications, etc.

EC2 doesn't do that, AWS does, for many things.

E.g. you can have a nice app running with elastic beanstalk, file storage on S3, database on RDS, full text search on CloudSearch, without worrying once about apt/yum, incompatible JVM versions, backups, stuff in /etc or setting up iptables and ssh, which is what most people think of as sysadmin work.

> without worrying about ... backups

Bad idea. Extraordinarily bad idea. Of course, I'll gladly charge you $450 an hour to recover your data when you accidentally drop a production table. It's part of how I make a living.

> setting up iptables

i.e. setting up security groups - same solution, better gui. Someone still needs to understand what it's doing.

Elastic Beanstalk... sounds cool, but based on the "let you take over management when you're ready", it's still a EC2 instance under the hood that's just configured for you. Scale at all, and you're probably going to have to start concerning yourself with all those bits you've been able to ignore until then.

AWS' automated offerings are good, but if you're doing anything at scale, they're frequently not good enough. And my experience has shown me that the line is really really painful to cross when you get to it with a fully staffed team, let alone a sole developer.

If I accidentally drop a table RDS have automatic backups and automatic snapshots.

> i.e. setting up security groups - same solution, better gui. Someone still needs to understand what it's doing.

Yes, but like being able to install wordpress doesn't mean you know how to program, setting up beanstalk+rds is not on the same level of expertise as setting up N machines from the ground up. When I start an RDS/CloudSearch/DynamoDB instance the security groups are already setup in a sensible way.

Sure, there are plenty of cases in which what AWS offers is not good enough. Heck having an ops team is always better than not having it.

But I replied to AWS only getting rid of "someone who can physically access the box". That seems reductive.

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