Amazon AWS Reviews

Amount of services, fully-managed services, and the power of Infrastructure as code (deployment and automation). AWS has many atomic services (Lambda, SNS, SQS. and so on…).

Migration of On Premise Data Center to AWS to allow cost optimization, and full operational automation to focus on experimentation and innovation.

Cross account possibilities for a big IT organization (user management, resources management, etc.).

It would be nice to be able to test Direct Connect without having to pay a line. Also, the possibility to use VPC Peering with one point VPN Gateway (for the moment, impossible).

More than one year.

Not yet.

Not when we know scalability optimization and processes.

I have not call AWS support yet, but it seems to be very fast according to the various returns I had.

Switched to be more global (AWS Region) and more to the way of a serverless paradigm.

Very simple, an e-mail address, a credit card, and the account is open.

The Free Tiers program is great for testing solutions.

Their terms of licencing and reserved instances are very efficient (like Spot Instances for identified workloads).

Not really, I fell in love with AWS right away: their services, quality and quantity of documentation. With the various testimonies that I received, I had no doubt.

The Cloud Adoption Framework and the Well-Architected on AWS documents are a must read.

• RDS: Because of its auto-scaling, multi-zone availability, and its quick spin up of database servers.
• EC2 Servers: For the agility of server provisioning and the AMI automations.
• Lambda: Because of AI capabilities by writing functions that trigger on events.
• Route 53: For traffic engineering.
• WAF: For security and multiple other features of AWS.

Rolling deployments, quick time to market;

From one day deployment time, it came down to 15 minutes.

Easy provisioning means quick time to market when a new environment is required.

The console's UI could be a little better, a fluid User Experience is missing.

For example, in order to see the instance details properly, we have to scroll the description part up or down, which is not a recommended way of doing it.

Three years.

Just once, when MongoDB infrastructure could not mount to EBS.

No.

Excellent. 10 out of 10 for this.

IBM Softlayer and Azure. Both are not automated to the level that AWS is automated.

Straightforward.

Pay per use.

Yes, RedHat OpenShift.

Migrate to AWS for speed and agility, combined with its security features.

The valuable features for us are scalability and flexibility.

Regarding scalability, we have specific days of the week that the traffic in our system exceeds more than twice the load system. So with the scalability, I can support this load. If I need to perform a specific marketing action, my system will respond to the request easily.

Before AWS, the time for availability of a new server would be more than a week, and currently, it can be measured in minutes.

Failover also wasn’t easy to configure and wasn’t safe.

It has helped our engineers to improve our performance both financially and in terms of traffic generated.

I see some applications, like AWS Deploy for example, require usage of other applications. This and other issues should be better explained in the documentation.

We have been using the solution since May 2012.

In the beginning, during the implementation, we had problems with stability, especially in S3.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

We don’t pay for professional support. However, the support forum helps us with most problems.

For cloud solutions, during our research, we searched the best quality service inside our budget.

The setup was very straightforward.

Unfortunately, the price is high. The pricing and licensing is explained well in the documentation.

We evaluated other options, including Rackspace, Google Cloud, MS Azure, etc.

Pay attention especially to costs.

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.

With AWS services, we can focus on our products, and that makes our customers happier! Also we can provide higher SLAs for our customers.

I have been using almost every service on AWS for years. I'm trying to test every new service as soon as possible.

The main idea of using AWS is its ability to act so fast! We used to have servers on-prem data-centers. When you needed a new server/device/configuration, it could take hours/days/weeks based on the demand. Now I can have what I need in couple of minutes. That is amazing!

Of course there are other cloud providers, but AWS is far the best on both technology and stability. You can find cheaper providers, but you shouldn't risk your business just for saving some dollars.

AWS gives you chance to concentrate on your business and products which I believe is the most important thing, especially for start-ups.

Here are the services that I'm currently using on AWS:
EC2, ECS, Elastic Beanstalk, Lambda, S3, EFS, Glacier, RDS, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, Redshift, CloudWatch, CloudFormation,OpsWorks, VPC, CloudFront, Route53, IAM, Certificate Manager, ElasticSearch Service, WorkDocs, WorkMail, SQS, SES, SNS, and API Gateway.

These days, technology is changing every day and AWS is one of the leaders of this change. They are at least one step ahead of you, which is great. You can have new technology as soon as possible. I think in general there is no need for improvement. All I can suggest would be a cleaner designed console. I generally don't like the user experience of Amazon. It's not the best. You can see the same at AWS Console. I'd be happier If the design and the user experience would more simple. Sometimes I feel that there are lots of texts on the page which makes harder to find what you are looking for.

We have nearly 100% uptime using AWS resources which makes us provide higher SLA's for our customers.

I have never faced any issues with the stability. This is one of the reasons why I chose AWS. They are more stable than any other cloud provider.

The best feature for most of the users is scalability. You don't need to reserve lots of servers just for peak times! AWS is doing this perfectly.

AWS has great support engineers. There are several types of support packages. Based on your package, they support you in their SLAs. Until now, they helped me well with every single ticket that I've issued.

I've never switched to any other cloud provider, but I've tested nearly all of them. Testing all providers gives you a great chance to compare services. To be honest, most of the time AWS was better.

Creating an account from AWS web-page is straightforward. Everyone can easily complete the registration process. Some people are thinking twice when they've asked for their credit card, but this is the nature of cloud systems. You'll pay as much as you use. It's one of the aspects of having everything easy and fast.

If you can plan capacity for one or three years, you can use the upfront payment option which allows you to save up to 50%.

I'm testing every major cloud provider regularly. Other than AWS, I've used Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Digital Ocean.

AWS has great how-to documents and videos. You can use these materials. We are here to help them whatever they need on their cloud migration/usage. They can find detailed information from http://calico-technologies.co.... or they can send an email to info@calico-technologies.co.uk or to me.

Our system is conceptually very simple. We organized the network to grow. The most valuable resource is the elastic feature which allows us to not worry about rising or declining demand.

We never assumed we would implement our system outside the cloud. AWS has several features available that we still have to try. The improvement is going to be done step by step, including each feature, one at a time.

AWS is in the right measure for now.

However, I was a bit disappointed with the AWS representative for Brazil. I invited him to talk about some strategic agreement to improve the cloud environment in my other work.

I was thinking of taking AWS to the top of the rankings in the Masters program. He dismissed the invitation and told me that AWS was undergoing restructuring and maybe he could talk to me sometime in the future. This happened almost a year ago.

Amazon and KickSIM made an agreement, so the startup could use the AWS cloud for a year, up to 3/2015. After that, KickSIM also experienced use of three additional cloud environments and then came back to AWS in January, 2017.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

All our needs were met by researching the documentation. AWS offers stable resources and abundant documentation. There is no reason to use the technical support frequently.

We did not switch yet. We maintain some minor operations on two other clouds.

The setup was straightforward and the infrastructure is running well.

The way AWS assigns prices is fully understandable and very transparent. Users are free to choose exactly what they need. They receive accordingly and there is no pain at devolution. It is all done by themselves.

We did not evaluate any alternative solutions.

Using this product has encouraged me to broaden my knowledge of the products offered by AWS.

The RDS renders deployment agility and there is an on-demand database-as-a-service for MySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server.

Among other benefits, one salient benefit for many Pythian customers is the option of spinning up a new instance whenever needed. This can be done with a few clicks.

RDS doesn't have shell access, which could be especially beneficial for Oracle databases.

I have used this solution for the past 2 years.

I have not really encountered any issues with stability.

I have not really encountered any issues with scalability.

The tech support is good and prompt.

For many of Pythian's clients, this solution is an amalgmation of on-premis and the cloud. Pythian enables its customers to reap the benefits of both worlds.

Due to Pythian's expertise and experience, the initial setup was a breeze.

Read the fine print carefully and always engage experts to carry out migration.

Having your database on RDS doesn't mean that you don't need DBA anymore. Mission critical and important databases must be handled by a DBA, even if the database resides on the cloud like RDS.

We were not a "born in the cloud" company. Our email server solution was first deployed as on-premise, then as a hosted service on bare metal in a data center and then has been ported to AWS.

The main reason to move from hosted bare metal to AWS was the flexibility in adding storage on demand. However, as we worked with Amazon we realized that it could help improve the scalability and availability of our SaaS offering with the other Amazon services.

Using AWS services has allowed us to have a more atomized architecture, which is allowing us to build scale into each service.

We have deployed a variety of services from AWS. Most commonly EC2, EBS, S3, Lambda, Elastic Search, RDS and NFS Gateway.

The cloud storage based on S3 is one the most valuable services we have deployed since it allows us infinite scale in storage and extremely high durability.

AWS is innovating at a very fast pace. They are very customer focused. They keep up and exceed customer expectations.

There was some new learning in terms of IOPS on the EBS storage. The concept of burstable IOPS was new and we did have a few outages when we ran out of IOPS. After moving to provisioned IOPs for the EBS we have not faced any issue.

Once the IOPs are used up, it takes a long time for the burst balance to be filled up. The only option is to move the data to another disk. This causes downtime. It would be better if we could continue to use at the baseline IOPs.

We did not have scalability issues.

Technical support is responsive, accurate and helpful. Right in line with their philosophy of customer obsession.

We have hosted our SaaS offerings on various data centers in India and the USA prior to moving all the workload on to AWS.

The setup itself was not complex. However, it was an involved exercise moving the email data of all our customers from the data centers to AWS without much downtime.

If you want to move all production loads to AWS, the fastest way forward is lift and shift (which is what we did). However, this may prove to be more expensive than bare metal until the time the solution is updated to use the different AWS services. For example, when we shifted the load to AWS we paid a high cost as the mail stores were hosted on EBS. The storage cost drastically reduced after moving to S3.

We did look at Microsoft Azure, but found that AWS had far more flexibility, options and ease.

There can be a tendency to get excited by all the options available. We advise to start small and focus on the services which solve your core problems.

In fact this is the very strength of the AWS cloud platform; easy and rapid experimentation, start small and scale on demand. The flexibility and malleability of the cloud platform has been an all new experience for us.