In short, making a good decision on what to try during the limited time you have is essential. You may ultimately decide that AWS won't meet your needs at all (as unlikely as that might seem, given all that AWS has to offer).
Focusing on the important issues during the trial period is the key to making AWS work for you. When thinking about AWS, you must consider these issues:
- Cost: Determine whether AWS will perform the task for less money.
- Speed: Decide whether the speed penalty of using the cloud outweighs the benefits.
- Reliability: Ascertain the risk of using the cloud versus keeping the task in-house (the cloud may actually prove more reliable).
- Security: Define the security requirements for your application and then decide whether the risk of using the cloud is acceptable.
- Privacy: Specify the application's privacy requirements (especially the legal ones). Enduring a privacy breach when the data is housed on someone else's system can prove hard to manage and cause permanent damage to a company's reputation.
- Flexibility: Consider whether the use of a cloud service will reduce flexibility to the point at which the application becomes unmanageable. In most cases, relying on the cloud reduces flexibility because the host reserves some configuration opportunities for in-house use only.