Using cloud infrastructure is the natural starting point for any new project because it’s one of the ideal use cases for cloud infrastructure – where you have unknown requirements; the other being where you need elasticity to run workloads for short periods at large scale, or handle traffic spikes. The problem comes months later when you know your baseline resource requirements.

Let’s consider a high throughput database as an example. Most web applications have a database storing customer information behind the scenes but whatever the project, requirements are very similar – you need a lot of memory and high performance disk I/O.

Evaluating pure cloud

Looking at the costs for a single instance illustrates the requirements. In the real world you would need multiple instances for redundancy and replication but will just work with a single instance for now:

Amazon EC2 c3.4xlarge (we can’t consider m2.2xlarge because it is not…