$30K/month and ~100 servers seems like a huge waste. I'm in the business of managing similar services. I handle, not photos, but video streams. My work is for one of the largest companies in the world (Fortune-5) and I deal with things like superbowl traffic spikes, etc... Everything is handled in house but for spiky loads, we look to things like Akami.

I realize managing at Fortune-5 is different than 100% oursourcing but the cost constraints, I have to imagine, are very similar. For example, I have to imagine Amazon gets similar price breaks from Cisco as my company - I know Amazon has custom built servers and all so there may be some advantages but at $30K/month, I think any hosting company would happily take 1/2 or 1/4 of that.

I'd be curious to know what kind of bandwidth loads you were pushing through AWS and how much of the AWS cloud can be made redundant per client.

Note that they were apparently doing very fancy image processing, not just pushing bytes; that does make things more difficult/expensive.

Yes, I took that into account in mulling things over. We do very similar stuff with video streams (post processing) before pushing to Akami. We also use SAN backed storage and Cisco CSM load balancers. All of our equipment is in the US and we use VMWare for everything. I know little about AWS and their virtualization technology but where I work, it would appear we pay a little bit more of a premium for VPS nodes if I assume Amazon rolls their own - the $30K just seems outrageous in this regard. And to top things off, we don't host just one web site; we have a myraid of applications spanning our data centers to deal with all sorts of stuff (many product lines each with their own web site with streaming, flash, user accounts, etc...)

Delphi Automotive, LLP - http://delphi.com/ - Auburn Hills, MI I work in the cluster division and I'm one of the leads on Cadillac CUE. We're looking for C and C++ folks who also are experienced with electronics. We work on some seriously cool new technology. Automobiles are rapidly increasing cockpit technology with more advanced center stack displays and clusters. You may also get to do a bit of robotics as some of our software controls needles and dials too.

Delphi Automotive is looking for software architects. We work on cutting edge automobile electronics and software. Many automakers are moving toward smarter center displays and display clusters. Much of the work is embedded C and C++.