The use cases of the solution depend on your project. The project I am working on right now is using Amazon Rekognition heavily, along with S3 and EC2. There are a lot of instances involving EC2. The last one involved using a text-to-speech, of which I don't remember the name, but that was the project's main goal. The use cases depend on the circumstance of your project, so it is not the same for all.
The most valuable feature of the solution is that they offer everything around in just one platform. They have almost everything. For example, a couple of weeks ago, I was trying to build a server with RabbitMQ for some kind of real-time communication in an environment where I was working. Amazon already has a service named Amazon MQ, because of which you don't need to configure your server by yourself since you already have it integrated into the ecosystem. It's easy to ensure that the server is there for your system without any issues and allows you to run it in seconds instead of three or four days.
Price is an area with a shortcoming in the solution that has a scope for improvement. Amazon can improve in some areas related to its pricing. Amazon selected the pricing plans, and I had to choose one. In general, it is an expensive tool.
It is cheap when you are starting with the tool since they have this free tier. However, that is not the reality when you really start working with Amazon since you will end up paying a lot at the end of every month.
I have been using Amazon AWS with different clients for six to seven years. I am a customer of the solution.
I believe that it's a stable product. I never had any issues with Amazon. I'm trying to remember, but I think that I have never faced any stability issues. It was working twenty-four hours and seven days a week all the time.
I have contacted Amazon's customer support. It was just a couple of calls when I was working in Iceland on a project, and the servers were not reachable. There was some kind of issue at the country level, not an issue of Amazon specifically. There was some issue with the solution in Iceland.
The initial setup is a thing that you need to learn. The setup part is not easy at all. Usually, in some companies, you have a person that works only with Amazon. You have one profile in your company just to work with the infrastructure services inside Amazon. You need a kind of specialized profile for that work.
The solution's pricing depends on your traffic since they charge you based on the traffic, not the servers. The price can go into many, many thousands depending on the traffic.
The price also depends on your services since, if you are using Amazon Rekognition or S3 with a low tier price.
Well, for a small company, normally, my advice would be that Amazon AWS is not the best option. If you are trying to use Amazon for the first time, it means you need a big project on your hands, and you already have an MVP running. If you are going to use Amazon for the first time, then you already know what you are going to deal with, so such people don't need my advice in that case.
The price is my concern, so I am searching for some other options to leave Amazon. It is not for quality-related reasons.
I rate the overall solution a seven out of ten.