What I just read is that for the cost of a single 16TB hard drive, they were able to rent a hard drive for 7 hours to stream 16TB, and they still had to devote meaningful engineering resources to avoid the cost overrun.
Does anybody here have a success story where AWS was either much cheaper to operate or to develop for (ideally both) than the normal alternatives?
In general, yes. My rule of thumb for a basic web server is 100k QPS per physical core on cheap hardware, slowing down if it's doing anything intensive (depending on the nature of the images being requested and how the requests are distributed relative to the disks' layouts, they could have been pegged at the disks' throughput for example), speeding up if you have a particularly light workload or better hardware.
Does anybody here have a success story where AWS was either much cheaper to operate or to develop for (ideally both) than the normal alternatives?