Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd think for most toy projects, running more than an EC2 instance or two is overkill. At least in my experiences, running the full stack on a single server works well enough for most hobby projects. I certainly don't want to spend $7 a day playing around with RDS for fun!
Definitely. But one of the nice things about a lot of the AWS stuff is that you can build on the same infrastructure you'd use if you wanted to scale up. So if you have a toy project that ends up being more successful than you expect, it's pretty easy to just add resources. For example, DynamoDB is ultra cheap for the lowest usage levels, but simply by reserving more capacity you can scale up with absolutely no chang…
Moving data from one instance of MySQL to another is usually straightforward as a one-liner, piping a SQL dump from the old database into the new one over the network...
mysqldump -hOldHost | mysql -hNewHost
...and waiting.