I use Amazon AWS to host services for my clients, as well as creating SMTP services for them. These are the main two use cases. AWS offers a wide range of services, but I do not use them all.
IT Director at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Flexible and offers a wide range of services, but the support could be improved
Pros and Cons
- "AWS has a lot of flexibility, which is great."
- "In terms of improvement, they should try to give more emphasis to the VoIP system."
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
AWS has a lot of flexibility, which is great.
What needs improvement?
Recently tried the boot on the desktop, which is where you create a virtual desktop, on a laptop for example. You provide this, and you can use a laptop on the cloud and have everything safe, without having to purchase an expensive laptop.
When I tried with another company, from Azure, which uses the same thing, that with the boot as desktop they had some work needed to make some changes to the AWS desktop. They are not as flexible or powerful as a platform as Azure on this subject.
Previously, they had great VoIP software that they used in AWS, and when I created an account, they didn't have the option to assign too many numbers, local numbers, that could be used for hosting.
In terms of improvement, they should try to give more emphasis to the VoIP system.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with Amazon AWS for the last two years.
You can deploy and create any number of virtual machines to meet your needs.
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Amazon AWS is very stable.
When I'm setting up SMTP servers for clients. They use SMTP as the main platform, but for example, on their CRM, and to be honest, I never go back to that to check for any issues from the day one that I finish the task and provide everything to the CRM developers to proceed with the integration.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have over 60 companies in our portfolio, and I would estimate that half of them use AWS services.
How are customer service and support?
Going through the chats has left me a little disappointed. It's taking far too long, and I have to come back with questions. The reason could be that they have too many departments internally, so they assign a ticket from one department to another, and it takes a long time to complete the task and provide an accurate solution.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I'm using both Microsoft Azure and AWS at the same time.
I am a Microsoft Azure certified technician, and some of my clients have asked me about some potential within the product. Based on my research, I discovered that this project can be easily designed using AWS rather than Microsoft Azure. This is why I'm learning more about AWS. It is similar to that of Microsoft Azure, and I'm using it, that we can, say, shut down Microsoft Azure completely and then send all of my clients to AWS.
Half of them are AWS, half are Microsoft Azure, and sometimes there are internal IT departments, which need to follow this path, to create the architecture on Microsoft Azure or AWS based on their architecture.
How was the initial setup?
They are difficult to set up. Before you can start using AWS, you must first read the documentation and learn a lot about it.
I would rate the initial setup a three out of five.
It is not very easy, and difficult to complete some of the tasks.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
They have a pay-as-you-go subscription. You pay only for the time you use the service. By service, I mean that they are not frequently used by clients. It's the best idea because they are very expensive to them because if it's a small company and you have the option of pay as you go as a solution, it would be less expensive, and better for the company in terms of saving money.
However, if some large clients, for example, use AWS as a hosting provider and compare their prices with other hosting providers, other hosting providers are more affordable.
I believe that a pay-as-you-go solution is very inexpensive, but not for monthly or fixed prices.
What other advice do I have?
I am a partner and reseller.
I would advise them, before they use the account before they open an account with Amazon, to do their account around just to learn a bit about that solution and then start using it, because it will take a long time to understand how that platform works, how you're going to create a VM on there, how you can create an SMTP.
It is not a simple procedure that we point to and then follows some steps to complete. You must be familiar with information technology. You must have at least basic IT knowledge of a hosting site. This is a platform, and before they begin using it, they must check a number of things and understand how they will proceed.
I would rate Amazon AWS 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 has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. partner / reseller
Technical Account Manager Premier Services at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Scalable, easy to deploy, and makes a lot of sense if you are growing
Pros and Cons
- "Scalability is one of the biggest benefits we have."
- "We have a very good approach internally with what we have developed. It involved overcoming some hurdles regarding the single point of truth or single point of configuration, which is sometimes not that easy for AWS. There are dashboards and you have your web service, but bringing all these together and orchestrating is sometimes quite difficult."
What is our primary use case?
We're a native AWS customer and a provider as well. We have multiple solutions running in there, and we are also doing infrastructure as a code and infrastructure as a service. For example, we can offer you lower prices than the price that you would pay for an AWS instance because we are an official partner of Amazon. So, we are taking all the advantages of what we currently have with AWS.
It is being used for ECM. In terms of deployment, from an AWS perspective, it is partly self-developed based on Terraform, and we are also using services like S3, S9, and all the things we have in AWS for DNS, but it is highly automated. When a customer comes in and says that they need an instance clustered with certain options and a certain amount of service, it's usually firing up one line of code, and then everything gets set up, including the infrastructure.
We're working with its newer version.
What is most valuable?
Scalability is one of the biggest benefits we have.
What needs improvement?
We have a very good approach internally with what we have developed. It involved overcoming some hurdles regarding the single point of truth or single point of configuration, which is sometimes not that easy for AWS. There are dashboards and you have your web service, but bringing all these together and orchestrating is sometimes quite difficult.
For how long have I used the solution?
My estimate is six years, but it might be way earlier. We ramped up way early with AWS on the market and developed together with them.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is very scalable. Our customers are from every corner you can imagine. There is no specific type of customers we are serving.
How are customer service and support?
We have a direct relationship with AWS. We are not running with the usual support with AWS. We have other possibilities and are directly integrated.
How was the initial setup?
It is easy. With our solution, it's really a piece of cake. Even my seven-year-old would be able to set up a cluster with high availability, as long as I tell her what to enter.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It is quite expensive in my very personal opinion. Going on-prem in a data center is, for sure, not as expensive as going to AWS, but when it comes to a point where you are raising and growing, it simply makes a lot of sense to stay in AWS. It is awesome in that way. I am not aware of any extra costs.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Azure is something that we are currently looking into as a second option, but there are no concrete actions planned.
What other advice do I have?
It boils down to two points. The first point would be to have correct planning. You need to know what you want to do and you need to be familiar with what you can do in AWS. The second very important point is that you need very stable and very good monitoring of your AWS instances. This is mandatory because if you fire up a very expensive environment and forget it over weeks, you need to pay for that. I've seen a lot of companies struggling to get an overview of all these AWS machines. It starts by tagging and so on.
I would rate it 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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January 2026
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Independent Contractor at a financial services firm with 1-10 employees
Reliable, and scalable, but artificial intelligence tools could improve
Pros and Cons
- "The most valuable features of Amazon AWS are the EC2 instance for web applications with CDN Networks."
- "There is a feature called Kinesis, which has to do with image processing. There are a few artificial intelligence tools that Amazon AWS should improve on."
What is most valuable?
The most valuable features of Amazon AWS are the EC2 instance for web applications with CDN Networks.
AWS Cloudfront is the official reference for the Global content delivery network (CDN) which significantly reduces latency or slow loading times.
What needs improvement?
There is a feature called Kinesis, which has to do with image processing. There are a few artificial intelligence tools that Amazon AWS should improve on.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Amazon AWS for approximately five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I have found Amazon AWS to be stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Amazon AWS is scalable.
How are customer service and support?
The technical support has been challenging. I have found more tickets are being placed and the availability of the agents has been limited for some of the team members.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We selected Amazon AWS because it was the most mature at the time. It was the initial cloud provider. Then Google and Microsoft also came up with Azure and TensorFlow. TensorFlow is catching up with a few code web programming tools, and that is a point of interest as well as image processing.
In a future release, the solution could improve on the IoT integrations and API access.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup of Amazon AWS is complex due to how infrastructure is set up in different organizations.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
For the initial 12 months, the solution is reasonably priced. On enterprise license contracts where you negotiate, have been reasonable too.
What other advice do I have?
I would encourage the student package for someone who is starting out, they can get acquainted with the interface and the tools available.
I rate Amazon AWS a seven out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Sr. Systems Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Good community support, but the pricing could be improved
Pros and Cons
- "AWS has large community support."
- "The billing should be more competitive."
What is our primary use case?
We are both a user and a provider of services to some of our clients. We are not official partners, but we provide regular services to set up our clients' infrastructure on AWS. We deploy their projects there with their own account so that we can hand over technical ownership whenever they need it. As a result, they can continue to provide their services to other consultants. we offer these services to set up their systems and their services.
We use Amazon AWS mostly for typical hosting for applications, some emails, queuing services, and databases most of the time.
What is most valuable?
I am not sure what features they'd like.
AWS has large community support. You are never stuck with anything if something doesn't work in time.
What needs improvement?
We don't have any issues for the time being, because I intend to use this in a limited, not exhaustive, manner. For the time being, we're fine with whatever we're doing.
The billing should be more competitive.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Amazon AWS for more than two years.
As AWS is online we are always using the most current version. We have some virtual machines that you create based on the version when you initialize them, but the services that you use on a daily basis are always the most recent version.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have a limited number of users and use standard services.
How are customer service and support?
There have been no issues. The support is good.
There are no issues at the moment.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We were hosting on bare metal servers. Then we moved on to VPS servers, which were managed by our technical staff. And now we're utilizing cloud services.
That technical management part for the multiple VPS, as well as for ourselves and our client, is taking a long time to maintain and everything. As a result, we went to manage services.
These are some additional options. I've seen that Azure has the best cloud dashboard, but the billing and other features are very difficult to use. The same as any other cloud service. The documentation is far superior.
How was the initial setup?
The installation is straightforward.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Cloudflare and other services are developing more affordable solutions. They provide a much cheaper alternative to Amazon's S3 storage buckets. That's something that could be improved.
This should be comparable to the other options on the market.
Billing for cloud services can be difficult at times. In the VPS, you only have quota-based billing management, but in the cloud, it's as if every bit and byte and every I/O operation is metered, and your bills can be surprisingly high when you've published something that can attract a lot of traffic, which is one catch.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We researched Microsure and Google Firebase, but we are not using these solutions.
What other advice do I have?
I'm not an expert. I don't have any advice at the moment, but whenever they're looking to host some applications, when there's a lot of traffic or bandwidth, they should think about it carefully.
I would rate Amazon AWS 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.
Senior Software Architect at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
It covers a lot of services, including computing, networking, storage, IoT, and management
Pros and Cons
- "We use AWS for multiple purposes, such as developing APIs and API integration using API Gateway. We use API Gateway, Python Combinator, Lambda Glue, and ETL Process. We have used EMR for big data processing. If we need a tool for computing, we go with the Lamda DMS. There are many services available in AWS that meet our needs."
- "AWS has room for improvement on the Kubernetes side. I would like to go a little deeper into the Kubernetes target, Elastic, inner system, and all that. The EKS, target, and all these areas need to be improved, but that is not my key area because I am mostly working on the application side."
What is our primary use case?
We use AWS for multiple purposes, such as developing APIs and API integration using API Gateway. We use API Gateway, Python Combinator, Lambda Glue, and ETL Process. We have used EMR for big data processing. If we need a tool for computing, we go with the Lamda DMS. There are many services available in AWS that meet our needs.
What is most valuable?
The feature that's most valuable depends on your use case. Elasticsearch is good for testing and DynamoDb for database applications. There are so many things I could name, but you have to go with the service that is right for the use case you are looking for.
What needs improvement?
AWS has room for improvement on the Kubernetes side. I would like to go a little deeper into the Kubernetes target, Elastic, inner system, and all that. The EKS, target, and all these areas need to be improved, but that is not my key area because I am mostly working on the application side. However, I sometimes still need to work with Kubernetes container management.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using AWS for the last seven years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
AWS has "11 9s" service availability, which means the service is available 99.99999999999 percent of the time.
How are customer service and support?
I would rate AWS support four out of five. They're good. I can activate cases on the technical calendar through AWS development support. I've gotten a lot of support through AWS Blue.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
How was the initial setup?
The deployment complexity depends on which template you're using: AWS Terraform or CloudFormation. It's easiest to deploy services via Terraform, so you can go with that. That is the most straightforward way, and you can do all automation within Terraform.
What other advice do I have?
I rate AWS nine out of 10. Everything is moving to the cloud now, and AWS covers a lot of services, including computing, networking, storage, IoT, and management, and they are good in every way.
They face competition from GCP and Azure, but Azure is entirely a Microsoft stack, so people will go with that when they're working with Microsoft solutions. It is a little cheaper than AWS. In the end, the cloud you choose depends on the use case. It's up to the customer.
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. Implementer
Senior Manager (Engineering Department) at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
Easy to use, multiple payment options, and highly reliable
Pros and Cons
- "The most valuable features of Amazon AWS are ease of use, deployment, and short lead time. If you are using an on-premise solution, you need to wait for the hardware, and nowadays it is very difficult, the lead time becomes very long. We propose to our customers to use Amazon AWS because it is very easy, no need to wait for hardware delivery."
- "If Amazon AWS can offer more self-paced learning tools, on their website, on CBT, it'll be easier for more people to familiarize themselves with their service. Especially when they are delivering new services from time to time. Educational tools that can help users familiarize themselves with their service. It would be great."
What is our primary use case?
The customer can deploy their application on Amazon AWS instead of taking care of their infrastructure.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable features of Amazon AWS are ease of use, deployment, and short lead time. If you are using an on-premise solution, you need to wait for the hardware, and nowadays it is very difficult, the lead time becomes very long. We propose to our customers to use Amazon AWS because it is very easy, no need to wait for hardware delivery.
What needs improvement?
If Amazon AWS can offer more self-paced learning tools, on their website, on CBT, it'll be easier for more people to familiarize themselves with their service. Especially when they are delivering new services from time to time. Educational tools that can help users familiarize themselves with their service. It would be great.
I know they have a Free Tier service, but they need to register their credit cards. Some of my colleagues have concerns. If the usage exceeds a certain value, they exceeded the Free Tier usage time and they will start charging your credit card. My colleagues forgot about the usage and credit card payments. They needed to pay for the additional amounts which they used on top of the Free Tier usage. If Amazon AWS could improve the free service model to be more user-friendly in a way of not using a credit card, that would be great.
For personal learning, you also need to register your credit card. You need to be careful or you will have to pay.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Amazon AWS for approximately two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Amazon AWS is stable. However, they have had a few outages but nothing very serious.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Amazon AWS is quite scalable. And they have a lot of auto-scaling functions for their VMs.
How are customer service and support?
I don't have direct information of the support from Amazon AWS because sometimes we are relying on Amazon's partner, not directly contacting Amazon AWS support teams. We need to have some support plan with Amazon AWS, otherwise, they will not provide direct email or technical support.
How was the initial setup?
The length of time and difficulty of the implementation depends on the scale and the complexity of the project.
What about the implementation team?
For the implementation of Amazon AWS, having two to three engineers focusing on it would be ideal. Small to middle size companies, don't have dedicated teams or engineers for a particular service.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Amazon AWS is offering different pricing, and saving plans, it's very easy for a customer to consider the Amazon AWS service.
Amazon AWS charges based on the user usage and some software license, such as the OS are included in their monthly charge. The transparency is quite sufficient, the customer knows what they're paying for.
The usage fees are an OPEX and they are offered monthly or annually.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I have evaluated Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend Amazon AWS to others.
Amazon AWS are the market leaders in the public cloud service and after them, we have Microsoft Azure, and maybe Google Cloud.
I rate Amazon AWS an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Partner
Senior Sales Account Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Organization visibility, great support, and highly scalable
Pros and Cons
- "We have many projects where we can resolve a lot of issues with Amazon AWS. It has given customers a lot of visibility with their data. Many customers do not know what they can learn from their data and I provide them with this using useful information using Amazon AWS."
- "The difficulty of the implementation depends on the project. We have a lot of very complicated and complex project which make the implementation more difficult. However, a small project can be very simple to implement. In general, over 90% of the project tend to be complex implementations."
What is our primary use case?
We used Amazon AWS when we work on a lot of projects in different situations or scenarios. We have done migrations from on-premise to cloud computing, projects involving data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.
Many of our customers use the website application that is hosted by Amazon AWS.
What is most valuable?
We have many projects where we can resolve a lot of issues with Amazon AWS. It has given customers a lot of visibility with their data. Many customers do not know what they can learn from their data and I provide them with this using useful information using Amazon AWS.
The Redshift features are very useful for large amounts of data.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Amazon AWS for approximately two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is very stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Amazon AWS is scalable and it is very important for our customers.
We have a lot of customers using this solution and our largest customer has approximately 16,000 users using the solution.
How are customer service and support?
The technical support is very good.
How was the initial setup?
The difficulty of the implementation depends on the project. We have a lot of very complicated and complex project which make the implementation more difficult. However, a small project can be very simple to implement. In general, over 90% of the project tend to be complex implementations.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
We are on an annual subscription for Amazon AWS.
What other advice do I have?
We create some processes to resolve some questions the customers have. They want to improve and have more visibility of their data, and how to extract information about their data. We help them with this problem.
Amazon AWS is the most important provider in the market. They have helped many of my customers.
I rate Amazon AWS a nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
IT Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Control Tower enables us to organize the different accounts our clients have
Pros and Cons
- "It's a very flexible and customizable service"
- "Monthly costs can be high if you don't maintain your usage"
What is our primary use case?
All of our clients look to migrate their workloads to the cloud and we propose the use of AWS depending on the technology of the client or the workload they want to migrate. Our primary use cases are workloadmigrations, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), sometimes platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS). We use different AWS services, Elastic cloud compute, Web application firewall, AWS firewall, LAMBDA, CloudTrail, and others.
What is most valuable?
AWS has a lot of services that are very good. One of the services I use is AWS Transit Gateway. This service allows me to communicate between different networks in different accounts. It's good for network communication. The other service I use a lot of is "Control Tower", it's a service used to organize the different accounts our clients have.
What needs improvement?
With regards to improving the service, I don't see any room for improvement at this time. I love the technology, it is a very good public cloud offering with very good services. Until now, there are no services that I don't like.
One other aspect, it would be good to see the basic service level improved with regards to response time. They don't offer 24-hour support.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Amazon AWS for around two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
AWS is very stable. They have an SLA of 99.99%.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
AWS is very scalable.
How are customer service and support?
My experience with AWS support is very good. There are four types of support: basic, free, business and premium. It depends on the level of support you have which determines how quickly they can respond about an incident, ticket or request you have.
How was the initial setup?
It's very easy to set up services in AWS. Depending on the solution you need to deploy it can be very quick. A virtual machine can be deployed in 5 minutes.
What about the implementation team?
Our company is a partner with Amazon, we implement in-house.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
What is hard with the public cloud service like AWS, is ensuring you maintain a good budget. Plan the monthly consumption properly. If you don't have the expertise in the cloud, your monthly cost can go very high. It's also very easy to set up services in AWS.
I would also suggest companies look for a good partner that has the necessary experience to deploy the services when moving to the cloud. It's very simple, but you need to design a very good architecture for cost optimization and performance.
What other advice do I have?
The solution is good for integration. It's very flexible and customizable with other services, public, cloud and on-premise.
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.
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