Amazon AWS Reviews

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.

• ECS (EC2 Container Services)
• EC2
• RDS
• Route 53

At this point, we have been testing applications that are managed by third-parties. The benefit we see at this stage is mainly cost. We are now starting to see the benefits that the platform has to offer.

At this stage, we have found the services we are using are meeting our needs. We have been asked by management to incorporate high-security (encrypted email and data volumes) on all services. Some of the security features require extra configuration to achieve that.

I have been using Amazon AWS for about seven months.

At this point, there have been no stability issues.

Scalability has been good using services like ECS, ECR Load Balancing, and Auto Scaling features.

We have not had a need to engage support for any assistance.

Our previous solution was supported by a third-party. We saw the opportunity to reduce cost by managing it ourselves, in-house.

The setup was easy at first, because a lot of the services are wizard driven. We found as we needed to customise the services further, we had to do most of this manually to get the desired result.

Pricing has been quite surprising, since we are running both DEV and UAT platforms simultaneously. It is definitely cheaper than the solution that has been managed by the third-party.

We did not evaluate other options. This was the one that management had chosen. I do not believe this was based on a technical viewpoint. I just think it was decided.

You have to be able to not think as if on-premises systems are sitting in a data centre. Everything, and I mean everything, is a service that is launched by a script. We are able to run up a platform, say UAT, entirely in about an hour. The plan will be to do this entirely by scripts.

Elastic Load Balancer: AWS completely manages ELB with less configuration from the users' side. Setting up the load balancer manually is really a headache.

Deploying to the elastic cloud is much easier now with AWS. This makes the go-live process easy.

Billing: They should make billing more simplified. It would be great if they could explain how deploying to elastic cloud is much easier now with AWS. Elastic beans command line interface [eb cli]: You can easily deploy code straight from your code IDE.

The billing calculator has lot of options which confuses the user. If they could provide some template for billing and directly execute those template, that would be great.

For example, the billing template for the standard WordPress Server with Load Balancer and S3 Connectivity: Users could just change the parameters inside the template and execute to see their estimated billing.

We have been using this solution for three years.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

We were using only AWS.

The setup was straightforward in all ways.

Free tier is always there for demo and testing. Pricing is based on the usage.

We evaluated Microsoft Azure.

AWS is good for any kind of requirements.

Auto Scaling and CloudWatch Logs are the most valuable features. With just a few criteria to scale in/out of, you can save the life and time for DevOps.

The CloudWatch Logs feature provides many plugins, so that we are able to manage various types of logs centrally.

In the era, we used private clouds as network virtualization must be controlled by the IT division, server rooms were in the remote branches and DevOps were distributed in various areas. Now, we can use the same API and the same workflow without considering to centralize the logs.

IaaS is sometimes way too complicated to complete one task.

I have used this solution for around eight months.

So far, the VPC is sometimes not that reliable. Therefore, we have to set up a redundant VPC to make sure the connection is always available.

We do not have any scalability issues until now.

I have never used technical support.

Previously, we surveyed OpenStack. However, due to the time, budget and manpower limitations, building a private cloud is not practical in our case.

Managing IaaS was very difficult in the beginning, i.e., tons of jargon to get up and I struggled for months.

Try the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). It is yet another good choice because sometimes, what you need is just a platform and not to build a platform from the infrastructure.

When your division grows to a certain scale and you really need DevOps, then you could move either to a private/public cloud. Otherwise, it is a waste of time and money.

For one of the clients I worked with, it has provided excellent storage solutions and infrastructure for deploying Java and PHP based applications.

It has helped reduce the cost by rationing the computing power and paying only on a per usage basis, instead of provisioning unneeded, idle, or unutilized computing power that is used only at 20% of its capacity or time.

Additional funds saved can be used to develop applications that add value to the business. Also, its features, such as auto-scaling help to manage capacity automatically.

Another feature that we are fond of is the Cloud Formation tool. It helps to test and develop a working technical environment and replicate and modify it as necessary across various regions, clients, and business units.

Features such as EC2, S3, EBS, Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, VPC (Virtual Private Cloud), RDS (Relational Data Service), Cloud Front, Cloud Formation, Elastic Bean Stack, etc., have been useful for the following reasons:

• EC2: Supports various operating systems, CPU configurations, helps to produce flexible computing power at affordable, customizable rates. You pay for only what you use. No need to pay for unused extra capacity. Build only what you need and pay for only what you use. It can help save tons of dollars in infrastructure cost.
• S3: Low cost, affordable, yet modern storage solution from Amazon.
• EBS: Low cost, yet fast storage solution. It helps to store the needed data in the quickly accessible storage. Also, it helps defending against DDOS attacks.
• Auto Scaling: Helps to quickly scale up, or scale down the capacity as needed. This would help in adding and/or removing computing capacity as per the need and helps reduce cost, yet provide a quick response as needed.
• Elastic Load Balancing: Helps to build redundant, waiting systems for which the demand can be routed as needed.
• VPC: Helps to define our own private cloud with marked input and output ports. Also helps in reducing the electronic footprint and defend against DDOS attacks. Helps to define the private cloud which will provide the needed security and privacy.
• RDS: Helps to dynamically manage the database services. Helps to independently select and/or switch among various database providers such as Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, etc. RDS helps to free up administrators' time by automating tasks such as backup, maintenance, applying patches, scaling, and replication.
• CloudFront: Helps to define cache of data across various locations and helps to improve the latency of applications.
• Cloud Formation: This is the much needed tool for technical architects. Here one can define the technical architecture they need and play around with it until they get a working architecture. Then the working architecture can be copied, reutilized among different regions, business units, clients, etc. This saves cost and time, reduces errors, and improves efficiency. A much needed tool for administrators and architects.
• Elastic BeanStalk: Helps to rapidly deploy applications across various platforms such as Java, .NET, PHP, Ruby, Python, Docker, etc. It also handles load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.

Many of our clients prefer in-house cloud rather than the application data sitting in the infrastructure owned and managed by Amazon. They prefer in-house/hybrid cloud environments.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

We have not used the technical support much. For the initial solution designing and PoC preparation, we contacted the sales and marketing team from Amazon. They were available and provided the necessary support.

We have used Azure and some other applications. We will continue to use them. We like keeping 2-3 vendors to have a healthy competition and see improvements in the products.

The initial setup was complex, as we needed to build the infrastructure from scratch. It would also require expertise in networking and security.

It is very important to safely manage the keys, as otherwise this would lead to costly security breaches. Some amount of playing around with the setup and replicating it via cloud formation will be needed until your architect becomes perfect with the tool.

It is decently priced. The competition is also bringing its own cloud offerings, such as from Oracle.

We evaluated Azure, Apprenda, and Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

Some of our established clients are going with Azure, especially the ones who had established .NET VB environments. Those who need private in-house cloud are going with Apprenda or Pivotal Cloud Foundry. For small to medium customers, AWS offers a good choice and savings.

It depends upon the requirements and the regulatory compliance issues of the customer. For small to medium customers, AWS is a good choice. For Java, PHP based applications, AWS is a good choice. If you need to have your own private, in-house cloud, there are other options.