Ansible, puppet, sprinkler, and the like would take a similar amount of time to configure.
I'm very impressed that you were able to build in 3 weeks time a low-latency multi-data center application with master/slave database failover, robust fault tolerant load balancing, and backups that can be restored in minutes with an API to control all of those services. That would normally take a senior team of engineers several months to accomplish and have it be of the quality and reliability of the services provided by AWS.
More likely is that you had a use case or a mindset that did not suit AWS very well and was easy to implement on your own. That's awesome and I'm glad you were able to find better value elsewhere. AWS is not for everyone, and is definitely quite expensive on the pocketbook.
it was more than just chef obviously but chef + any bare metal host environment gets you a large percentage of the way there. Tacking on specific aws services like route53 when necessary works too.
The benefit of AWS is that you have some immediate bootstrap, and simple auto scaling. This last is a killer feature. Being able to scale your caches and load balances silently, based on metrics, is a real time and money saver.
Sure. You need to have a level of scale to need that :) but when you do, AWS can have some good features.
