The fact that this guy is using GP2 EBS volumes right off the bat makes me question his AWS savvy. If he’d optimized from the start in the cloud, the story could have been about ‘How I Saved 2x on Monthly Infrastructure Costs,’ with a meaningful discussion around trade-offs and architecture choices. Instead, he’s running an idle server, consuming 400W like it’s still 2007
It seems to me that at this point, being an AWS customer is about as difficult as running a server manually. It's just different skills. The risk of running your own servers is certain kinds of downtime may be harder to fix (though if you have some "sysadmin savvy", ie, backups, it shouldn't be much), and the risk of being an AWS customer is accidentally paying 10x what you should.
You say that as if AWS pricing isn't designed to be confusing in order to get people to spend more money. There are people who do nothing but consult on AWS because it's so complicated. I don't want to learn AWS, I want to build things.
