Does anyone use Amazon Web Services? Do you have an suggestions regarding where to start when coming from the .NET and Azure side of things?

Not got any advice but congratulations for leaving azure! Slowest cloud service I've ever worked with 😞

So, you're coming from .NET and trying to go where exactly?

Start with what you know. Provision a Win2k12 VM on AWS, setup IIS and deploy an app you already know works to it. Perhaps something that could use S3 storage?

Setup security controls for your VM (inbound/outbound rules), auto-provisioning rules (with a super low threshold during testing), a load balancer, etc. (Hopefully not all of that was Greek to you.)

Assuming you want to try a LAMP/MEAN stack and you've already completed the above (so you're somewhat familiar with where things are located in AWS), setup a *nix VM, security rules, etc., and then go ham!

FWIW, I use both AWS and Azure.

emes001 I plan on staying in both but I wanted to expand my knowledge base and wanted to see if there were any gotchas before I dove right in. I'm interested in the compute side of things and want to see if AWS offers a better solution than Azure.

Is there anything I can setup without a VM or should I just start there and move forward using exposed services in AWS within that provisioned VM?

Off the top of my head, I think you'd have to setup a VM within their EC2 product. Not sure if there's anything more "ready made."

You may also be interested in their HPC product. Not sure if they give you "free" hours for that or not though.