Though Shareaholic is hosted in the AWS cloud, we avoid depending on Amazon’s virtualized cloud services whenever possible. If we ever hit a bottleneck in AWS, I want to be able to switch providers without needing to rebuild a core piece of our architecture. I also don’t want our tech team to have to make product and infrastructure sacrifices just so that we conform to AWS standard practices.
Load balancing with HAProxy was the first example of a service that Amazon provides, that we felt was better to manage ourselves.