athrun

AFAIK, last generation t1.micro instances were also EBS-only.

IMO, the issues you are describing are not design errors. They were _bugs_. I would argue that Dropbox's design is quite resistant to failure since it allows for offline work and can even provide some P2P sync functionalities when the backend servers are down.

I played with Django REST framework a week ago and was surprised on how easy it was to get going with it. The documentation is almost complete and the tutorial is especially nicely done as it begins with a naive - and tedious - approach and then proceeds to simplify everything using the advanced features of the framework. This really helps prevent the 'magic' effect as we get a clear understanding of what is happening behind the cover and where one should look to extend or override the default behavior.

Overall, I found it to be quite feature-rich. One aera of improvement might be the built-in token-based authentication. It seems that it's currently using a "shared secret" approach instead of supporting signed-requests, thus limiting its use to HTTPS only.