Amazon AWS Reviews

I am an AWS Certified Solution Architect Associate as well as a Certified Cloud Practitioner, and I am currently pursuing the development specialty. I mainly use AWS to develop cloud solutions for clients.

As a Solution Architect Associate with focus on development, my clients typically ask me to help them personalize AWS services as they pertain to the client's business. For example, I will often work with AWS SQS queues, ETL jobs, APIs and storage, and other services offered by AWS in the cloud.

Generally, my work has more to do with development rather than architecture, and other AWS services that I use include EC2, S3, Lambda, API Gateway, Amazon Connect, Alexa, DynamoDB, ECS, and EKS.

My daily activities are essentially focused around implementing AWS services for clients who want to migrate their existing computing infrastructure to the cloud. For example, if a data center is on-premise, our solution is to bring that data center to the cloud. This kind of migration includes moving all the applications that a company uses to the cloud in progressive steps. We also work to enhance their applications with extra code and the advanced features that the AWS cloud offers, like Lambda for instance. 

The clients that I work with — which include large organizations like universities — also use cloud providers other than AWS, including 3Cloud, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. I, however, specialize only in AWS and Azure.

Here is an example of how AWS has helped one of our clients: With Amazon Connect, we can track all activity in the past and in real-time, so we can know how many calls are in progress and if there are any problems. With a student payment system, for example, if a student has a problem because their credit card was rejected, we're able to trigger an SMS notification to somebody so they can contact the student to make a payment with a different form.

The university is thus able to offer a streamlined payment service with automatic fallback options (e.g. receiving payments with a card reader in person) and all of this is automated thanks to AWS Lambda, which lets us handle customized metrics automatically and in real time.

The AWS feature that I most enjoy is Lambda functions. I primarily use serverless components because they allow you to process things without having to compromise on resources like when running EC2 instances or virtual machines. With minimal effort, you can scale up an unlimited number of processes, even concurrently, to process things. I frequently work with web APIs, so I use Lambda a lot in this area.

Recently we had a long conversation about functionality that is missing in Alexa — in Mexico, specifically. Alexa for Business is a service and platform that Americans can use to make a call to an Amazon Echo device or a telephone via the app. But in Mexico, we are not allowed to use that technology. This is a significant disadvantage of AWS for those living in Mexico.

I also think that Amazon Rekognition could be improved. For example, I have used Rekognition to label things like trucks, buses, etc. Then we put a camera in front of a bus, so that we can send notifications if the bus driver overtakes another car on the wrong side of the road. However, it seems that Rekognition's machine learning doesn't yet have the capabilities needed to make this kind of labeling and recognition system work properly. Thus, we've had to resort to alternative solutions.

And in terms of how easy it is to learn, Amazon doesn't have the most friendly educational platform. It is very obtuse, in fact. I have wasted a lot of time and effort studying through the official channels, so now I mostly use Udemy courses instead. They are very practical and much simpler, but I would still prefer to learn from the official educational platform if it were improved.

I have been using AWS for about five years now. 

The stability of AWS is very good. 

I work with AWS Lambda all the time and I never have any problems with scaling. Recently, Lambda launched a new billing system, which is cost per millisecond. Before, we would get cost per hundred milliseconds, as the minimum, and now if we use only 10 milliseconds, then the cost for 10 milliseconds is exactly how much we have to pay. So that's great, because now I can scale my functions with a precise cost calculation.

I currently have several issues with Amazon Connect because we can only obtain two telephone numbers by default. With this scenario, there was a very difficult process to let Amazon know that we are not working for ourselves in our console, and that we offer our services as a third party, in terms of SaaS and IaaS, to our customers.

I'm not directly involved in the creation of accounts, and I just use them once they are created on the company or client's side. But in Amazon Connect, when we needed to add more users, the time response from Amazon was two or three days. We are subscribed to the developer support plan, and I think two or three days is a lot of time.

Either my company or the clients usually have the console already set up when I start work on it, so there's not much in the way of setup that I can comment on.

With the AWS projects that I lead for clients, it's basically just me that works on deployment, implementation, and maintenance.

When it comes to professional certification in AWS, I implore others to study hard before your exams because $300 is a painful waste of money if you fail.

With AWS products, there is a steep learning curve and I think there are so many aspects because it is really an ecosystem. If you are committed to reducing costs, or increasing performance, or optimizing in any manner, you have to know the solution really well.

I think the best way to achieve this is by experience, but if you don't have any experience, studying hard is the next best thing to do.

The two alternatives I've considered are Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. However, because I am only certified in AWS, I don't know the difference between, for example, Microsoft functions in Azure and AWS Lambda functions in a commercial sense.

In a technical sense, though, AWS seems to be more comprehensive in the programming languages that it supports. For example, with AWS Lambda functions I can program in Python, PHP, Go, and many others, but with functions in Azure, you are limited to fewer options.

To our client, it's neither here nor there, because they're typically not involved in the actual development, but if you use Azure architecture then you're going to be limited to the programming languages that Microsoft supports.

If you want to take advantage of all the benefits that AWS offers, then it's best to take the time to learn how the entire ecosystem, and each part of it, works. 

I would rate Amazon AWS a nine out of ten.

It has been useful for running virtual services for some of our internal applications. Some of the developers are using it for doing some kind of development work on robotics process automation or RPA.

It is quite easy to provision new virtual services for our use. The procedures are quite straightforward and simple as compared to other competitors, such as Microsoft or Huawei. This is what we are happy about with Amazon AWS.

It is pretty mature in terms of the availability of most of the infrastructure components. If you want to deploy a server on your platform, everything is already there in terms of the operating system, network components, securities, and data encryption. It is also quite scalable and stable.

Our use case is limited to virtual services and RPA development. We are not using it quite heavily, and there are not many issues or problems so far. However, it would be great if it could be integrated with more AI features and proactive monitoring. It could also have more automatic capacity expansion features. For example, when renting out some space, memory, or computing power, the service can have the capacity to expand by itself without being manually handled by us.

I have been using this solution for two to three years.

It is quite stable.

It is quite scalable. It is easy to expand and unsubscribe. In terms of the number of users, we have ten administrators from the IT side.

We have interacted with them. They are quite responsive to our inquiries.

The initial setup was easy.

It was pretty much done by our in-house developers.

Licensing is on a yearly basis. I believe we are satisfied with the current pricing. Otherwise, we would have switched to another vendor.

I would recommend this solution. Amazon AWS cloud is pretty mature in terms of availability for most of the infrastructure components. It is a one-stop shop that gives everybody simple steps to get things done, which is great.

I would rate Amazon AWS an eight out of ten.

I'm a service provider providing services to customers. I'm using AWS as sort of a generalization. There are 62 products offered by Amazon on cloud-related services, which include EC2, includes Silverlight, it includes a whole bunch of different solutions, F3, EBS, so we've got solutions that we have to support for all of it.

Glacier is one of the solution's most valuable features.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The user interface (UI) needs improvement. Right now, it's not the best.

The product's authentication method could be better.

The pricing model could have a more competitive edge.

It would be great, in a future release, if the solution offers unified hybrid management, or hybrid cloud management.

I've been using the solution for four years at my current company. Personally, I have about eight years of experience with the product. I've worked with it for quite a long time at this point.

Generally, the solution is pretty stable. That said, when they have an event or an outage, it's pretty severe.

The solution is quite scalable. A company that needs to expand the solution should be able to do so pretty easily.

We have applications that run on AWS. However, in terms of administrators or interface people, that interface with AWS directly, we have probably about 80 users on the product.

I personally have never conversed with technical support. That said, I haven't heard of any complaints about their level of service. From that, I would assume that our organization is largely satisfied with their support offering.

The initial setup is not complex. It's pretty simple and straightforward.

If you know the patterns for how to set up and host, it's a quick deployment. We normally automate all of our deployments anyway, so the deployment process itself is quick and easy.

The product is an a la carte service. It offers a set of microservices that are associated with it. Therefore, the solution pricing varies quite a bit.

The pricing could be more competitive. If a company is questioning whether it's cheaper than owning a server yourself and running a server yourself, the general answer to the total cost of ownership is yes, it is cheaper. However, if you have to move data around a lot, it will not be cheaper.

We've evaluated other options as we use a variety of other solutions as well. We've evaluated a lot of other companies.

We're an Amazon partner as well as customers of theirs.

We're using the latest version of the solution.

I would recommend that most small to medium businesses that they use a consultative agency or a managed service provider to help them with the product.

Overall, I would rate the solution seven out of ten.

Most of our managed services are in Amazon Web Services. We also use Kubernetes clusters for some of the cases. 

We are basically on the cloud, and most of our clients prefer AWS as the cloud provider. Most of the solutions have been on-premises, which basically involves migration to AWS. We also started using a hybrid model because some of the clients prefer a hybrid cloud kind of approach, where they have an on-premises model and something on the cloud so that they can just connect their data centers to the public cloud. 

We are mostly using EC2 compute and other resources. Most of our managed services are in AWS, which some of our clients prefer.

User personalization and robotic process automation services need to be mature enough. More APIs are required for robotic process automation services. Azure is more mature in terms of user personalization and robotic process automation services. 

The document processing can also be better. Whenever we want to do any kind of document management, I try to do OCR, ICR, etc. The functionality in AWS has to be more like that.

I have been using Amazon AWS for almost two and a half years.

It is a stable product. We do not have any issues with its stability. Most of the customers come for 99% to 99.95% availability. 

AWS has a very highly scalable model. Because the availability requirements are high, we typically go for additional redundancy. It is easily possible to support different operating models in AWS.

Their technical support is very good and fast. Whenever you need something to be fixed, they are able to do it completely.

It is comparatively very easy. We have our own R&D environment where we do our work. When we want to actually do something for the client, we just move the work that we have done in our R&D environment into the client's cloud. It is very easy to use all the services.

Its price is kind of okay. When we do a migration from on-premises to the cloud, we typically use the lift-and-shift model. Based on the studies that we have done, cost savings are definitely there when we moved from on-premises to the cloud.

I feel that you shouldn't basically stick with any particular cloud provider. If you really want to take the benefits of a multi-cloud environment, you should not build your applications focused on any particular cloud provider. You should build something that is generic, and whenever required, you should be able to switch to any kind of cloud provider. People tend to actually focus on one particular cloud provider, and they start building their applications to cater to that provider. You shouldn't do that. You should reap the benefits of all cloud providers. This is what we also say to our clients.

I would rate Amazon AWS an eight out of ten. It is really good as compared to the other cloud providers such as Google Cloud.

We're building an application and host on Amazon. We are a startup company, so it's in a very early development stage. We're trying to build a particular application for multiple customers. The idea is if you have a VPC for each customer you can segregate each client with their own isolated environment. That's what we're building. We're going to build one application that can be personalized for each client. 

The fact that we as a startup don't have to invest in expensive hardware and a place to house it is very helpful for our small business. It saves us money in the long run in overhead costs and allows us to stay streamlined. There's no heavy investment on the outset and we're really just renting the exact amount of what we need.

AWS is a cloud platform. There are hundreds of tools within it. The cloud handles the updates so we never have to worry about looking for the latest version of the solution.

The solution offers a low footprint. We don't have to come up with a data center ourselves. We basically don't have to own any hardware. We just rent a slice of their platform and we have everything we need.

The biggest area for improvement is the fact that there are a vast amount of tools. The best way to describe it is this: you have lots of Lego pieces, hundreds of Lego pieces, but they all do something specific. However, it's very difficult to understand the purpose of these tools, how are they fit into our environment, our design ideas, etc. To assemble all of these tools, to make them fit into the architectural vision of the company, is very difficult. This is especially true for a startup that doesn't have unlimited resources for research and study. We cannot comprehend the vast amount of information that Amazon produces.

The pricing is very confusing.  

They should really consolidate and make things simpler rather than offer you hundreds of random options. The way everything is arranged really forces users to figure out everything on their own and then, on top of that, to calculate the total costs. There's an infinite number of combinations even just with cost calculations. It's too much. 

While the company has been around for three years and has used the solution since its inception, I have only worked here for three months and have a total of three months of experience with the solution.

The solution is very stable. AWS is quite reliable and we haven't had issues. There haven't been bugs, glitches, or crashes. It works well and as expected.

AWS is extremely scalable. It's designed to be. The sky really is the limit. Users and organizations can expand as much as they like.

We're a small company right now. We're still in the startup phase. We have about 20 people at the moment. We have a dozen developers directly on it now. That said, you probably only need two people for development and maintenance.

We do plan to expand in the future.

Personally I haven't used their support yet. I cannot give more info. I've only been at the company for three months and haven't faced any issues that required me to reach out to technical support.

We are just a startup so the company is young. The founders made the choice to use the database and they've used it since day one. 

The initial setup is both really straightforward and complex. At first, it's simple. However, as you get deeper into the solution and work in all kinds of variations or all kinds of scenarios, things get really complex. The more you have to consider the more complicated it can get. The complexities multiple quickly.

We use Terraform to provision the best infrastructure, which makes our platform really easy to manage in terms of our implementation strategy.

We handled the implementation ourselves. We didn't need to hire on an integrator or consultant to assist us.

The calculating of costs is quite difficult. There are all kinds of variables to consider and it's all very unclear.

It's my understanding that our company is charged a few hundred dollars on a monthly basis.

My understanding is that this product was used from day one. I don't think other options were considered. However, I was not at the company when AWS was implemented.

We're a startup company. It's a very small company with only 20 people. Everything we use is cloud-based. We're simply a customer of AWS. We don't have a special relationship with the company.

I'd warn others considering using the solution that the environment is vast and complex, and a company will need a lot of tools at their disposal for research and to understand the product. If there are people within the organization who already have experience with the architecture or with similar solutions within the AWS environment, that will help make implementation successful. It's important to bring people who have previous AWS architecture experience into the organization.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. It does do everything we need it to do, however, as a small company, figuring it out is a big effort. Making it more streamlined or straightforward in the future would probably give it higher marks.

We use the solution for cloud service and analytics. 

The tool's most valuable features are AWS Security Hub and AWS GuardDuty.

There are plenty of areas for improvement. For example, the ease of tagging could be improved. The tool could integrate AI tools to identify better and manage costs. Calculating the cost of some services could be more straightforward.

I have been working with the product for six to seven years. 

I rate the tool's stability a nine out of ten. 

I rate Amazon AWS' scalability a ten out of ten. My company has 200-300 users.                   

The quality of technical support depends on how much you pay. 

Neutral

We used GCP before and switched to Amazon AWS because it was cost-effective. 

I rate Amazon AWS' deployment ease as five out of ten. It can take a few weeks to complete. 

The deployment process was completed in-house.

The solution's ROI is good. 

I rate the tool's pricing a six to seven out of ten. 

I recommend the solution to others because of our smooth experience. I rate it an eight out of ten.

I used Amazon AWS for a financial company.

Amazon AWS has a good Redshift database. 

Amazon AWS is a very poor product for students and difficult find out solutions. Microsoft Azure is a better solution.

I have used Amazon AWS within the past 12 months.

I have used Microsoft Azure.

I have implemented Amazon with the Redshift database for the ETL components.

I find Amazon AWS very expensive compare to Microsoft Azure.

I have evaluated Google cloud.

I rate Amazon AWS a seven out of ten.

We like the that, within the public subnet of this solution, a new instance of the tool is launched when it detects an issue, in order to prevent interruptions in performance.

We would like the system documentation for configuring this solution to be improved, in order to provide better process clarity.

Similarly, we would like more templates to be available to download for performance-oriented architecture, so that we can re-purpose them for our environment.

We have been working with this solution for the last five years.

We have found this to be a stable solution.

This solution allows for easy auto-scaling.

The initial setup for this solution is straightforward.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.