Choosing the Right Additional AWS Service Integration Approach                                    

Taking the right approach to choosing AWS core services to leverage is important. These services are enormous boosts to productivity, but integrating them into your application needlessly doesn’t make sense. Here are the guidelines I recommend:

✓ If this service area is one in which you have no expertise, rely on the AWS experts to run it. We all are pressed for time, and learning a new skill while under the gun is inefficient and pointless. You’re unlikely to be better at it than Amazon is, and you can invest your time more productively in areas where you have the expertise.

✓ If this service area doesn’t provide unique functionality or differentiate your application, rely on the AWS service. Though your application may be much more satisfying to your users if you have its content locally cached, nobody will buy your service because you personally implemented a set of geographically distributed servers to support low latency access. You’ll be better served by focusing on what’s in the content, not on how the content is delivered. Rely on CloudFront for whatit’s good at, and direct your energies toward something that provides user value.

✓ If this service is one that you aren’t certain you can provide significantly ess expensively than Amazon can, rely on Amazon to implementit. Most IT organizations are terrible at estimating their true costs to deliver a service, and if there’s even a chance that Amazon may be more cost-effective, you’re better served by leveraging AWS, because Amazon likely runs it far less expensively than you can.