I work on the AWS - the AWS Lambda portions of the Amazon cloud.
Cloud Security Architect at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
Reliable with good security but is difficult to set up
Pros and Cons
- "There is no downtime. The solution is reliable."
- "It's a good cloud, however, if I compare it with Azure, Azure is more of a feature-rich cloud."
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
It's a good cloud for beginners.
There is no downtime. The solution is reliable.
Deploying resources on AWS is fairly easy and more secure than any other cloud. That's what our initial impressions are.
What needs improvement?
Amazon AWS is very lame in the sense that it's into some sort of beginner stage stuff. Most of our customers prefer Azure Cloud over AWS. Azure has lots of features, especially on the identity side. It has integration with the social media built-in plugins. It has integration with a plethora of applications. It has that sort of an ecosystem. Amazon, on the other hand, on most of the integration side, there are applications in Java or there are customer-specific applications and therefore we have to do the development. This is in contrast to Microsoft Azure, where we get the ready-made plugins.
Our experience is AWS should be preferred for the financial sector where there are not very many changes. It's more minimal changes that come into play on the implementation side. We recommend Microsoft Cloud to most of our customers, especially when they want quick implementation and there are a plethora of things to integrate the cloud with.
With AWS, we feel it has a lot of improvement areas. It's a good cloud, however, if I compare it with Azure, Azure is more of a feature-rich cloud.
The initial setup can be a bit difficult.
I expect AWS to come up with more identity features. They should have a very robust identity federation system, like what Azure and maybe Google Cloud are offering. Identity has some sub-verticals, like single sign-on and multifactor authentication and federation with some on-premise systems like ADFS servers or LDAP directories. Those things are very difficult to configure in AWS. AWS should come up with more connectors and more robust and user-friendly IdAM systems so that we can reduce time. We should be able to implement our projects faster.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using the solution for two to two and a half years at this point.
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?
In terms of stability, the first impression is whatever services we have provisioned in the AWS cloud, we've never caught any issues where we needed to reach out to the Amazon support team. There is no downtime, for example. There are no application crashes. We don't need to plan any high availability or disaster recovery for any of our servers. In regards to that, Amazon is doing a very good job of offering good performance and reliability.
How are customer service and support?
We've never needed to solicit the help of Amazon technical support, In contrast, in the case of Microsoft, we definitely needed their help.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Right now we are working on three clouds actually, Azure, AWS, and Google and we have SAP Cloud in the pipeline as well.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is kind of difficult. It's not just users going to Amazon and buying it from an Amazon account. You have to do a lot of configurations.
On a scale of one to five, one being easy and five being hard, I'd rate the implementation process at a four.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
We don't buy the clouds. We give them to the customers and our customers buy the tenants, the subscriptions. They are aware of the license documents with Amazon and the other cloud vendors. Once we have the subscription of a customer, we do the technical implementation.
We don't get into procurement or subscription renewals or product updates or anything like that. We are more on the technical side.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We were doing some research on Oracle Cloud. Whether we are going to build the practice on Oracle Cloud or not, that's the call that has to be taken by my leadership.
What other advice do I have?
My job role is as a Cloud Security Architect. I prepare solutions and I sell them to the customers. My work primarily involves working on identity systems. I primarily work on the identity federation side. You have identities and disparate sources, and we prefer to have a single identity source using federations and then we prepare solutions around it and sell them to our customers. Those kinds of solutions are the ones I work in.
My advice for first-time users is, if you wish to migrate your private data center to a private cloud where you have servers like VPN servers, radio servers, you have servers for your own applications, whether it's Windows, Linux, Unix, or ADFS, it's better to go for an AWS cloud. However, if you are looking for identity Federation or identity provisioning, then you need to go for a Microsoft Cloud.
I'll rate AWS at a seven out of ten due to the fact that it's very secure. It has very good migration categories for the on-premises servers and applications to the AWS private cloud. I can't rate it ten out of ten due to the lack of IdAM features I've seen, and AWS has less of a user base as it's not very user-friendly. This is where Azure scores a lot higher for me. It's very user-friendly and it's feature-rich, actually. If AWS can develop a more feature-rich offering, it will be on par with Azure.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. partner
Founder and Managing Director at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Quick deployment and offers automated vulnerability audits, ensuring system security
Pros and Cons
- "Security, quick deployment, and scalability are the top three features for me."
- "Pricing is the one feature everyone wants AWS to improve."
What is our primary use case?
It is primarily for cloud hosting. If you're developing a solution for a customer who wants it on the cloud, then AWS and Microsoft Azure are two major choices. There are other providers too, but AWS is quite user-friendly.
We use AWS for scalable cloud hosting and computing services. We store all our customer data on Amazon EC2 Instances.
How has it helped my organization?
We haven't had any security problems, and Amazon offers automated vulnerability audits. This helps us test our solutions for vulnerabilities and show customers that our systems are secure.
What is most valuable?
Security, quick deployment, and scalability are the top three features for me.
What needs improvement?
Like every other customer, I'd suggest pricing is the one feature everyone wants AWS to improve.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using it for five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is a stable solution.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is a scalable solution. We've worked with about five customers so far.
How are customer service and support?
We haven't needed technical support.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Sometimes, customers ask for AWS solutions, but we offer choices based on their needs. Price and geographical preferences can influence their decision. Sometimes, the customers can go for a cheaper product. We don't force them, but we make recommendations.
How was the initial setup?
The quickest way to set it up is the most beneficial feature. We can set up resources quickly and scale them as needed, starting small and growing as requirements increase. That's very helpful. It saves us a lot of time.
The initial setup is straightforward if you spend some time learning it. They're improving the user interface, which helps.
What about the implementation team?
My team takes care of the implementation. They find it easy to deploy. We haven't faced any issues so far.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It's not very pricey, but it could be cheaper. There are other options like GoDaddy and HostGator.
There are various options, and some can be cheaper than paying a full license.
What other advice do I have?
Read the documentation carefully before starting. Preparation saves time in the long run. For example, the ease of integrating different AWS services depends on your expertise.
Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Partner
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Consultancy at a educational organization with 201-500 employees
Ensuring the integrity and streamlining tasks without any downtime
Pros and Cons
- "It streamlines tasks like table creation and data loading into Redshift, making the process more efficient and manageable."
- "There should be improvement in terms of creating databases of varying sizes which would provide flexibility."
What is our primary use case?
It plays a pivotal role in data processing and application development. In our projects, we've harnessed the power of AWS for a range of applications. One key scenario involves building pipelines to process data collected from devices, such as audio and video footage. AWS services like Amazon Kinesis and Lambda functions were used in conjunction with other services like DynamoDB, SNS (Simple Notification Service), and SQS (Simple Queue Service). Another use case involves handling data from e-commerce websites. We collect and process this data using AWS Lambda functions, SNS, and Elasticsearch. The processed data is then fed into a separate application, which serves various marketing and analytical purposes.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable is ensuring the integrity of our written code through thorough verification. Also, we've leveraged AWS services like Redshift and Glue. Glue, in particular, is a potent tool that simplifies the ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) process. It streamlines tasks like table creation and data loading into Redshift, making the process more efficient and manageable.
What needs improvement?
There should be improvement in terms of creating databases of varying sizes which would provide flexibility.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with it for three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It offers good stability capabilities. We haven't encountered any issues or downtimes.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
In terms of scalability and data security, AWS excels, which is why it's a prominent player in the market.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We receive data from SAP systems, which we process using Databricks. Within Databricks, our coding approach varies; sometimes we use SQL, and in other cases, particularly in certain projects, we employ PySQL and SpotsSQL. We then process this data, which might involve SQL Server, Oracle, or other databases. For ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) processes, we've worked with Data Factory. When dealing with data originating from SAP systems, which often includes unstructured or semi-structured data like JSON, we make use of a diverse toolset. This enables us to load data into databases such as SQL Server and Snowflake or any other required database.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was straightforward.
What about the implementation team?
The setup process was facilitated through CI/CD pipelines. Initially, we used the AWS CI/CD pipeline but later transitioned to GitLab because we encountered limitations with certain AWS CI/CD use cases. In GitLab, we found more flexibility, enabling us to execute specific functions or steps independently. In contrast, AWS CI/CD typically follows a more rigid sequence, where phases are executed sequentially from initialization to build and deployment.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing may vary and is often influenced by marketing strategies.
What other advice do I have?
It's a valuable tool, but working with AWS can be challenging. I would rate it nine out of ten.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Senior Software Engineer at a tech company with 51-200 employees
The product has an all-encompassing ecosystem, but the pricing should be improved
Pros and Cons
- "The ecosystem offered by the product has almost everything."
- "The initial setup is not easy at all."
What is our primary use case?
The use cases depend on the projects. The project that I am currently working on uses Rekognition heavily. It also uses S3 and EC2. My previous project was using it for the text-to-speech feature.
What is most valuable?
The ecosystem offered by the product has almost everything. A couple of weeks ago, I was trying to build a server with RabbitMQ for real-time communication in an environment. Amazon already has a service called Amazon MQ. We don’t need to configure the server ourselves because we already have one integrated into the ecosystem. It’s easy to install the server in our system. We can run it in ten minutes instead of waiting three to four days.
What needs improvement?
The initial setup is not easy at all.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the solution for six to seven years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is stable. I never had any issues with Amazon. It works all the time, 24/7.
How are customer service and support?
I have contacted support. It was just a couple of calls. We weren’t able to reach the server. There was some issue at the country level in Iceland. The problem was not with Amazon specifically.
How was the initial setup?
We will have to learn to setup the tool. Someone with no experience would not be able to do it. In some companies, there is a person that works only with Amazon. The person will be profiling the company to work with the service center infrastructure inside Amazon.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The solution should improve the pricing. The area that I work for is expensive. The product is cheap when we start using it. It provides AWS Free Tier. However, it is not the same when you work continuously with Amazon. We end up paying a lot at the end of every month.
The pricing depends on the traffic because they charge by the traffic. They do not charge us based on servers. The price also depends on the services we use. It would be different if we used S3.
What other advice do I have?
The product is not the best option for a small company. If someone is trying to use Amazon for the first time and already has an NPP running, they can use it. If someone has used Amazon, they would already know what they are going to deal with. The cost is a concern for me. Some people are trying to leave Amazon and are searching for other options. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Senior Software Engineer at a tech company with 51-200 employees
A solution with a great uptime that needs to improve its pricing models
Pros and Cons
- "The most valuable feature of the solution is that they offer everything around in just one platform."
- "Price is an area with a shortcoming in the solution that has a scope for improvement"
What is our primary use case?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Amazon AWS with different clients for six to seven years. I am a customer of the solution.
What do I think about the stability 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.
How are customer service and support?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Head of DevOps at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees
A stable and scalable solution with easy setup
Pros and Cons
- "I am impressed with the solution's EC2 EKS."
- "The product should reduce carbon emissions."
What is most valuable?
I am impressed with the solution's EC2 EKS.
What needs improvement?
The product should reduce carbon emissions.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with the solution for ten years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I would rate the tool's stability an eight out of ten.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I would rate the solution's scalability a nine out of ten.
How was the initial setup?
I would rate the solution's setup an eight out of ten.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate the product a nine out of ten.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Partner
Head of Implementation and Security at a financial services firm with 1-10 employees
It makes deployment and management of infrastructure easier
Pros and Cons
- "AWS's containerization is the most useful feature for us."
- "I'd like to see AWS implement consolidated billing for businesses operating under one group. We want to consolidate the functionalities but keep the billing separate. That is a challenge we've faced, and I feel it's something they can improve on. For example, maybe you have three businesses that are operating under one group, and you want each entity to have a separate bill for the respective workload that they're using."
What is our primary use case?
AWS makes deployment and management of infrastructure easier. We are using so many features, including Lambda, Elastic Beanstalk, Elastic Container Service, EC2 instances, and Landing Zone. We rely heavily on AWS, and we're constantly taking advantage of new features as they come out to see how they can add value to the business.
What is most valuable?
AWS's containerization is the most useful feature for us.
What needs improvement?
I'd like to see AWS implement consolidated billing for businesses operating under one group. We want to consolidate the functionalities but keep the billing separate. That is a challenge we've faced, and I feel it's something they can improve on. For example, maybe you have three businesses that are operating under one group, and you want each entity to have a separate bill for the respective workload that they're using. But in terms of technical expertise, you want to consolidate the technical support and function of the three accounts. That's an area where AWS is struggling.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using Amazon AWS for about four or five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
AWS is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
AWS is scalable. We're serving close to 7,000 or 8,000 end-users with it.
How are customer service and support?
AWS support is good.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
AWS is pay as you go.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We reviewed the main three cloud providers: GCP, Azure, and AWS.
What other advice do I have?
I rate AWS 9.5 out of 10. I would recommend it.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Lead Architect - Expert Enterprise Data Solutions at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Good storage and API gateway but needs a metadata framework
Pros and Cons
- "The storage on offer is excellent."
- "Their metadata management in AWS needs improvement."
What is our primary use case?
We are primarily using the solution as real-time streaming to our data-lake. We also have microservices publishing to APIs. It's a customer 360 application.
We also used the product for migration from on-prem Hadoop to AWS EMR.
How has it helped my organization?
We used to spend about $57,000 on-perm with another solution. Then we lifted and shifted to AWS. It came down in cost to about $33,000 while maintaining the same inner software with Apache Kafka. However, we then got into ECS Fargate, and that brought costs down further to about $22,000. When we removed ECS, we moved into a serverless Lambda for 45 million, and our billing is now $8000 per month. It's an amazing amount of savings.
What is most valuable?
The solution's API Gateway is very good.
The storage on offer is excellent.
Recently they improved a lot in the analytics that they have on the backend.
It's great that the product is completely serverless.
The implementation for end-to-end, for Lambda serverless implementation, is excellent. I do run about 16 million messages per day with their Lambdas, for my API microservices.
The initial setup is not difficult.
What needs improvement?
We get a lot of exception errors, and we're working with AWS to figure out how to fix that. when we lift and shift . We get a lot of alerts.
As our serverless Lambda is maintained by AWS, in a certain aspect, we need to gain some more visibility into what is going on when problem happens with AWS serverless
Their metadata management in AWS needs improvement. They need a centralized metadata management tool, where it can be integrated with outside metadata tools with the API. We really need a central metadata framework.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using the solution for four years. It's been a while at this point.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability of the solution is very good. there are no bugs or glitches. it doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. That said, initially, we did have a few problems, however, everything has ironed out. It's great now.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scalability-wise, the product is very good. The Lambdas and the serverless architecture are very good on AWS. If a company needs to expand, it can do so with ease.
We have a lot of APIs, and we'll run them on my customer 360. There are six departments that use the product. We have about 1,000 users currently.
How are customer service and technical support?
We've dealt with technical support in the past and have not been satisfied for the most part. Azure's technical support is much better. AWS often can't help us resolve our issues. But they brought some good consultants basing on our request and helped us . The account Manager always there when he took over this account .
i recommend IAAS AWS , for IPAAS ( integration as platform service) and Hybrid cloud Azure
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We've also planed for Azure. We've found Azure to be much more helpful when dealing with issues than AWS has been. I prefer them over AWS in support , application development and integration as platform. But AWS has great products like S3 , API gateway , transit gateways , route 53 . AWS has more OS options than AZURE and database offerings. their EMR is good with spark and python but not well supported for Scala and HBase. AWS serverless offerings are very good with out any major problems which includes ECS with fargate and EKS . But we got a good support from account manager
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is not complex. When we lifted and shifted faced lot of problems on EMR. Moved to ECS, as well as serverless Lambda, it's was that difficult then. That said, we had to think about how we run our Lambdas, and what problems we are facing or might face.
We're also facing a few problems due to the fact that we use encryption, HCM. When we initially started loading this data, batch data, a lot of Lambdas came, and our limit in HCM is only about 5,000 a minute, however, it quickly jumped up to 20,000 which made it so that we could not load, and errors came up. We had to turn to AWS to get assistance. We just ask them if we can have space over a few days for 20,000 and then they scale it back to 3,000. they helped us
In terms of the implementation strategy, ours took about eight months. The lift and shift happened within 3 months. Then, we took another four months as we had a lot of problems with our scale-up programming due to multiple issues - for example, libraries, EMR, AWS doesn't have. We faced some problems when we had to change our code according to AWS, or we have to bring in those libraries on our own. So that's where it took time, maybe four months.
For ECS, it took about 30 days to move everything we needed to.
We don't have a lot of staff to maintain the product. We have about eight people who are capable of doing so. For example, we have someone on infrastructure, who is an architect and we have an enterprise architecture team. I have four developers, two for API and two for Lambda, and one is a systems admin.
What about the implementation team?
Initial setup environment helped by AWS free . We were able to handle every aspect of the implementation in-house. We didn't need any consultants or integrators. We used our systems manager so that all of our deployments - including environments and keys - can be stored on our SSM. A lot was automated as well.
What was our ROI?
excellent in covid -19 situation .
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
We saw a lot of cost savings when we switched over to AWS. It can really save a company a lot of money.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Azure and AWS
What other advice do I have?
I'm a user and implementer.
The solution is on the cloud; it's always the latest version. It's constantly being updated, and we're always using the latest version.
We use both public and hybrid clouds as deployment models.
I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
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