Amazon AWS Reviews

Accelerates innovation through fast experimentation cycles in an agile, flexible, and scalable platform.

Enables fast prototyping, simulation, and rapid deployment of infrastructure configurations. Has low risk exploration of new architectural paradigms and technologies (FaaS, Containers, IoT, and Machine Learning) and is easy to integrate with current solutions.

Considering the rate of innovation of AWS and the vast range of services offered (over 15+ categories, 50+ services in 2017) the learning path of customers on the platform is something that can always be improved. Usability through simplification of the interface for the use cases chosen by the customer can be a possible improvement.

The current interface offers several options to select services, solutions, or learning paths. However, the ability to simplify the interface to focus on customer use cases could have an impact on productivity and ease of use.

This is a challenge that I’ve seen all cloud vendor share: Usability and different user experience on their platform is difficult when the span of services is so vast. However, some design thinking “persona” kind of approach could help offer alternative perspectives.

• Since 2012, in prototypes and proof of concepts
• Since 2015, in production applications, advise, and support to some clients.

I’ve never experiences issues with stability related to the AWS infrastructure. The services are very resilient and there are constant reporting and monitoring tools available, a open status dashboard, and a personal health dashboard to receive news on any issues being investigated or sorted out. Even if there have been outages reported in AWS history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... their technical response capabilities have proven outstanding.

I’ve never experience issues with scalability. AWS services offer very flexible set of tools to architect solutions that give the best performance and economic advantages. Combined solutions using elastic computing capabilities, containers, APIs, and even more innovative server-less capabilities (FaaS) can be leveraged to tackle the most challenging use cases.

I previously favored RackSpace and Digital Ocean for simplicity and focus for certain use cases (development prototypes, proof-of-concepts, etc.). I prefer to concentrate investment and training on the same platform when solutions scale and require more complex setups. Leveraging the learning curve on the service offering is increasingly specialized.

The setup is easy and greatly supported by the learning paths offered through the platform. Expertise is required to take full advantage of AWS tools and continuous innovations.

Some customers can become overwhelmed by the range of services, so training and assistance from specialized third-parties is strongly recommended. Even experimented managed service providers can complement internal capabilities and help in the training of internal teams.

One of the advantages of AWS is their high rate of innovation. However, in order to leverage this, internal or external expertise is required. A good partnership is recommended.

On demand, pay-as-you-go pricing is powerful to optimize expenses, but it’s important to keep a technical cost controlling function aware of usage and scale patterns to choose the best pricing mix.

Massive migration to cloud without analyzing the right service for the right usage can lead to higher cost than expected. It is important to get the right advice to match each use case needed to the optimum cloud economics.

Even if a lot of decisions to go to the cloud are based in the promise of lower costs, the true power of cloud services is their flexibility, rate of innovation, and avoiding vendor lock-in if architected consciously.

Even if a lift and shift approach with short schedules can lead to mistakes in choosing services and paying more than optimum, the speed in which you can correct the mistake is not comparable to any other infrastructure option.

This is forcing even the traditional hardware vendors to reinvent their business models and develop financial offerings that include operating expense based financing (pay-as-you-grow) or services based agreements (pay-as-you-go) to make their private cloud offerings competitive.

The other aspect to consider is the managed service required to get the most of this platform. Don’t underestimate the quality of the advice and support required. But at the same time, consider your core business management time released by adopting a platform instead of managing the components internally.

The internal expertise should evolve to understand how to use it best for the business outcomes pursued instead of the technicalities of how to make it. That’s where the right partnerships can be leveraged.

We evaluated Azure, RackSpace, Google Cloud, SoftLayer, DigitalOcean, and Linode.

Test drive it with prototype applications, reproduce development and testing environments, and standardize your stacks to be able to move them easily, if needed. The deeper that the infrastructure-as-code approach is part of your culture, the easier it will be to leverage hybrid opportunities and gain agility.

This solution has been consistently in the top of the IaaS market for the last 10 years.

The features which are most valuable are EC2, S3, and the networking functionality. EC2 allows me to provision new servers in minutes. S3 allows me infinite, redundant, easily accessible storage. The networking functionality (VPC, Security Groups, subnets, etc) allow me to create robust networks that make sense. Availability Zones allow me to design systems that are resistant to failure.

One example is our devops people can provision new products and systems almost immediately. They have set up an instance of GitHub Enterprise which has become our "source of truth." We have created proofs-of-concept in hours to days to test and evaluate new products across the enterprise. We have been able to leverage the agility of AWS to work faster and, in some cases, "fail fast" so we can get on to the next thing, which works.

Probably customer education and awareness, especially in the Cyber Security area. Many people are mistrustful of public cloud offerings or misunderstand how things work. We'd like to use AWS a lot more for various workloads, but gaining approval to do the things we want to do is currently our biggest roadblock. This isn't necessarily AWS's fault, but hopefully they have the capacity to gain acceptance in the broader Cyber Security community.

I have been using the product for two years.

Our main issues are learning how to deploy the most efficiently. We use Puppet and Jenkins to deploy. Other issues are employee awareness and training (which instance type to use, where to put things, which keys or security groups to use, etc).

No more than expected number of stability issues. We have the occasional EBS volume go down but we expect that.

None at all. AWS is infinitely scalable. Though on one occasion, our preferred instance type was not available in the Availability Zone we wanted it in.

Customer Service: AWS's customer service is ridiculously good. Back when I was admin of an account that only used a few hundred dollars a month, I got top-notch support from my account manager. He set up a couple of conference calls with Solution Architects with no hesitation. Now I preside over an account with significantly more usage, and the customer service remains great.Technical Support: AWS has some really smart people who can analyse my technical questions and give me a cogent, useful answer in short order. Their tech support is top-notch.

We have also use Terremark e-Cloud, but their cost and lack of features turned us off. I don't believe it was an either-or situation, though. We used both but are moving out of e-Cloud and are staying in AWS.

I was not with my current agency during the initial set-up phase.

The agency used a vendor team. I'm with that vendor team and I think we're pretty good, but I'm biased.

We don't calculate ROI, but AWS definitely helps us fulfull the agency's mission, which is how we measure things here.

I personally have evaluated Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Neither seemed as robust or mature as AWS.

Jump right in and make liberal use of AWS' technical support. Even now, I see people hesitating to ask and trying to figure it out for themselves. AWS is always ready to help. It's both complicated and useful enough that it's very easy to build things in a suboptimal way if you don't think things through and follow their guidance. So get all your hands-on staff to take the training they offer and don't be shy about asking for help. The training is big.

We are primarily using the solution for evaluation purposes.

The functionality and the UI are both very straightforward.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The stability is good.

Technical support is quick to assist.

The pricing could be better. It's a bit expensive. 

The availability could be better.

I've been using the solution for about two years.

I haven't had any issues that would bring stability into question. there are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

I can't speak to the scaling. It's not something I've attempted. I just use it myself.

I can't say that there are plans to increase usage right now. 

Technical support has been great. They are helpful and responsive. They are very fast.

This is my first cloud product. I did not use something previously.

The initial implementation process is not difficult or complex. It's straightforward. It's basically having the computing power, the storage, S3, and the database.

The implementation was handled in-house. We did not use an external integrator, reseller, or consultant.

It's a costly product.

We pay a monthly licensing fee. It's below $100 a month.

I haven't done any evaluations or comparisons with other products.

We are customers.

We are using the latest version of the solution.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

We use Amazon AWS as a data platform.

The features that I have found most valuable are its cloud storage and compute services.

Amazon AWS could improve on its data warehousing appliance.

Its only cons are on the data warehouse side. AWS' data warehouse Redshift is not as good as it should be.

In terms of what should be in the next release, I would say nothing much other than that AWS has a lot of services doing similar work. If they could consolidate and make sure that the services are defined appropriately, that would be an improvement. Currently, there is a duplicacy of work.

I'm working with AWS for almost five years.

The stability is very good.

You do not need tons of people for maintenance, because a lot of automation will be brought in by AWS, and you can have one or two people to manage the platform.

Amazon AWS' scalability is very good.

There are a lot of features that require scaling - the scale up and scale down aspects of load balancer, Spot Instances, On-Demand Instances, and all those things. You can configure your limits, and based on that, the computer infrastructure can be scaled up.

There are tons of users using it. Whatever the project I work on, there are almost 200 users using it.

There are lot of data engineers, data scientists, and business users using it.

Customer and technical support are very good.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The licensing costs are all similar. All charges are similar in nature, such as storage cost, compute cost, VM cost, or VP costs, and all those things. Two advantages on this point here are whether you take Spot Instances or if you reserve for long term usage, then you'll get a lot of benefit.

If you want to use any third party services you have to pay from the Marketplace, but the other things are all pay-as-you-go kind of a model.

Amazon has a great customer base and lot of success stories. That is one advantage that AWS has, whereas the others are catching up. Recently they have more case studies, but for overall breadth of the industry and breadth of the customer experiences, AWS has more customers. AWS has more services than the other competitors.

My advice to anyone thinking about using Amazon AWS is that they need to set up the foundation well, and they need to choose the right partner to do the implementation. The more experience the partner has, the better the implementation will be.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Amazon AWS an eight.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

It is intuitive, easy to deploy, and rather quick to deploy and set up. There are a number of native services in the ecosystem. These services are built into the cloud and are mature enough to support you in many ways.

It is relatively secure and definitely reliable for uptime.

Amazon still has room for improvement in terms of being more mature on the monitoring side and in terms of the native capabilities. Amazon should get their services portfolio stronger on OEM-based workloads such as Microsoft and Oracle. There are a lot of areas that still do not have offerings, so there is room to grow. I would be happy if they bring more maturity to the monitoring capabilities and SaaS offerings. They are strong on Infrastructure as a Service, but they are not mature on SaaS.

Amazon is not at all a partner-friendly company. Support from Amazon is not at all good as a partner.

We are a technology consulting and managed services company. For our customers, we've been designing solutions on Amazon Cloud for almost seven years.

It has been stable so far.

It is scalable.

Support from Amazon is not at all good as a partner. We wouldn't lose sleep by not working with them as a partner, but we would continue to work on that technology. It is not at all a partner-friendly company.

It is easy to deploy. You can quickly deploy and set it up.

Considering the product, support, service, and maturity, I would rate Amazon AWS an eight out of 10.

We are hosting some education servers and web servers.

We have used Amazon AWS for a very large scale of server deployment. Also, we have run some tests using resources from AWS EC2. We don't have to go out investing for that resource, we just use them for a short period of time and we pay only for that usage. It has helped us scale quickly, and save a lot of money instead of buying those services.

The features with Amazon AWS that I have found most valuable are its flexibility and high availability. These are the most important and attractive points for me.

In terms of what could be improved, I also use Google Cloud GCP and AWS cannot directly use the Azure EC2 consult. They could add that feature. Direct connection to the EC2 console server would be very useful.

I am certified on AWS from the cloud provider side. 

I use the RDS, Relational Database Solution, and the EC2 technology on AWS.

I have been using it for more than four years.

Amazon AWS is quite stable. I have read a lot of reports from third parties, and they also have a robust testing methodology. And from my own experience, I can say that it's really, really very stable.

In terms of scalability, the sky is the limit. There is no limit for scalability. If you have money to spend, you get whatever resource you want.

We had some issues and we had pretty good support. They even created a special attach for us to solve our problem and they responded very quickly. If you buy the additional support, the support is really good.

The initial setup is easier now. Four years ago it was harder, but nowadays it is a lot easier, because a lot of boiler plate set ups are done for you. So you can just start using it right away, even if you are not experienced. 

Four years ago, it was not like this, but it's better now.

In terms of price, it is more expensive than other cloud providers, but it is worth it. It is not that much more, so you can go with it. It's not too bad. It's more expensive than the others, but it's bearable.

On a scale of one to ten I would rate Amazon AWS a nine.

To bring that up a bit, as I mentioned, I would like to have a direct connection to the EC2 server console. That's why I'm just not giving a 10.

For anyone interested in using Amazon AWS, I would advise them to read the online documentation. It's very clear and shows you step by step how to use the system. If you need more advanced features, you can find a lot of resources on the internet and on their website. So if you want to use a public cloud, I strongly advise using AWS.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

I primarily used the solution more for a POC. The solution was primarily used for data lakes. However, my use case is more focused on getting the IDs up and running.

The dashboard is very good.

The solution in general is user-friendly and easy to navigate.

The product as a whole is very intuitive.

The initial setup was quite easy.

The product is reliable and quite stable.

The solution is fine for static hosting.

I cannot recall coming across any issues or any missing features. 

There are some other issues I see, but that was more on the security side, not on EC2. That's more of a technical thing. I was not able to get it up and running, however, that was a different issue altogether. It was more due to my understanding of the solution.

I want to use AWS as a full solution for my website - for domain and website hosting, and everything in between - however, I was not able to find everything together. They should work to make it an easy all-in-one end-to-end solution.

The product is a bit costly.

I've used the solution a bit, however, my specific experience is not up to date. My usage is not on the production side.

The stability is very good. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. The performance is good and overall, the entire solution is reliable. 

We haven't attempted to scale the solution yet, as we are still at the POC phase. However, ultimately, that is the plan and it is my understanding that it will scale well.

We've yet to contact technical support. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they would be.

The initial setup, in the end, was pretty straightforward.

The solution can get to be expensive.

We are using different services. We are using Alexa, for example, and static hosting. We do have a corporate account, however, we're not using a lot of services on it.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we are using.

We don't have a dedicated private cloud and therefore use a public cloud.

I'd recommend the solution to others. Overall, we enjoy using it. 

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

Public Cloud

We use Amazon AWS for cloud deployment of Automation Anywhere tool.

It should be more secure and have more integrations. 

I used Amazon AWS for about three months.

It is stable. For the cloud version, we require some installation platforms and we don't have a server with us right now. We require it from Amazon AWS. We can just plan and get the AWS server.

It's scalable.

We have one contact person for our organisation. Through him, we gave him our requirements, and he arranged all those things about AWS for our installation. We gave him the details of the quantity of RAM & hard disks, and our expectations.

It's perfect to use.

Private Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)