What is our primary use case?
I work on the AWS - the AWS Lambda portions of the Amazon cloud.
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.
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