With ec2 you still need to backup. You still need to validate the backups. Security it still something you need to do since an instance is still just a VM. Same with s3 buckets etc. Google for public s3 bucket "breaches." You still need to apply patches, to configure access, to expand volumes, to configure VPCs and security groups.
As far as I understand, when you use an EC2 volume, it is already backed up for you. It is not the case for an OVH dedicated server. For instance, backing up your OS image is a lot more work with a dedicated server than with an EC2 instance.
That addresses one possible set of failure scenarios. If you think that means you have a backup that is guaranteed to be accessible to you whenever you need it, you don't have a backup. If your only backup is in the same cloud provider where your primary system is, you don't have a backup, you only think you do.
Any reasonable dedicated setup will involve imaging your server, and so the OS image is not something you need to back up - if it fails you reimage. If you even store the OS image on the server at all rather than network boot.
That's still a lot better than what you have with a dedicated server.
For you to lose your OS image with a dedicated server only takes your HDD to die.
For you to lose your OS image on EC2 (where you made a snapshot of your volume in one-click) would take a lot of shitstorm to happen at AWS -- as I presume that they backup across sites.
> For you to lose your OS image with a dedicated server only takes your HDD to die.
Only if you don't have a backup.
Why in the world do you think anyone would store their only copy of an OS image on a single server?
For systems I set up, to start with, the OS is mostly immutable, booted and updated transparently to match a master image. If it gets destroyed, we just image a new server. The applications all run in containers, based on images stored on replicated file servers. If they get destroyed, we just re-deploy on a different server (in fact, automatically redeploying is trivial).
Only the application data is unique to running servers, and that needs to be backed up just as much whether those containers run in a cloud environment or locally, and again it's trivial to have automation in place for the backup and re-deployment of that. Been there, done that many times.
> For you to lose your OS image on EC2 (where you made a snapshot of your volume in one-click) would take a lot of shitstorm to happen at AWS -- as I presume that they backup across sites.
For me to lose my data on any bare metal system I've run, multiple servers in at least two different data centres operated by at different companies would need to fail at the same time. This is not hard to set up, and it's a one of setup. You then need to test your backups, just as you need to with AWS - an untested backup is not a backup.
But your assumptions of failure scenarios is also flawed. You need to protect against e.g. disgruntled employees, hackers, bugs as well. If you rely on the same security to protect your backups as your main setup, you don't have a backup.
EC2 is great when you can justify the cost, but it does not remove the need for a proper backup policy and processes to test them.
