This is the first in a series of posts about things that surprised me when I started to work with AWS services. This particular surprise was one of the first, back in 2013, I was still teaching VMware courses and was invited to attend some AWS training. On the first day, the trainer explained that you could deploy as much software-defined network and as many VMs as you wanted. That was all a given at the time when VMware was struggling to integrate Nicera (now NSX) with vSphere. Then my mind was blown when the instructor said that EC2 (the VM service) is not that interesting. The real fun is in the AWS services that you use to assemble applications. The next two days were spent learning about these services and labs where I actually built an application. It was just too easy, even when I started going outside the lines. The lab had the usual prescriptive guidance about how to configure everything to work as intended. I built the autoscaling group of EC2 instances that would respond to the number of requests in a queue and take input data from object storage and place results in more object storage. The lab instructions only told us to scale-out the cluster, I worked out how to configure scale-in too & managed to test that still in the lab time.
Now that I teach the AWS courses, I do see more acceptance of applications that run in VMs, the way they do on-premises. But I now talk about EC2 instances as the last resort for when you have no better way to achieve your objectives. Usually, a managed service is a better option because it requires less work from you and often because it costs less in AWS bills too. I noticed that the Developing on AWS course is very focussed on serverless application development, meaning no EC2. New applications shouldn’t require working with legacy constructs like VMs, but you can have your VMs for your older applications.
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