Many cloud users moved to the public cloud for cost reasons, but stay for the availability benefits. AWS (and other public clouds) offers users tremendous advantages in terms of elasticity – need another 100 servers? We can spin those up instantly. Unexpected CDN demand? No problem. Want to test something out? We’ll get the resources right away. In short, the public cloud offers users nearly unlimited capacity in a comparatively (to the old “order the servers from IT”) instantaneous manner.
However, along with the fantastic increase in availability, we have found that using a public cloud is far more complex than it first appears. As anyone who has tried to navigate through the AWS management console will attest, there are numerous opportunities for missteps. Unfortunately, the errors are rarely obvious and always sacrifice functionality. Here, organized by service, are 10 common and avoidable traps with a brief explanation of what each means and why each matters. Importantly, these are all readily identifiable through manual account inspection or with the help of an automated tool from CloudCheckr, Cloudyn, CloudVertical, or other vendors.