Amazon AWS Reviews

We have migrated all of our on-premise production environments to the Amazon AWS cloud and we use many AWS services.

The solution could improve by being more secure.

I have been using Amazon AWS for approximately six months.

Amazon AWS has proven itself as the market leader in the cloud solution environment and is highly stable.

The solution is scalable.

All of our production environment is hosted on Amazon AWS and we have approximately 12,000 users that use it.

We have enterprise-level support that is very good from the AWS team.

We use other solutions, such as Microsoft Azure for UID and Google Cloud services for DCP.

The initial setup is not difficult and it did not take us more than one day.

We have a managed service provider that helped us with the implementation of the solution.

We have a 60 person team that manages our data operations and infrastructure. The team consists of many levels, such as system engineers, architects, and managers.

We have a monthly subscription for Amazon AWS.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Amazon AWS an eight out of ten.

My primary use case is to set up an end-to-end application to deliver a business case involving data ingestion, processing, transformation, and checking, followed by outputs to other functions and processes in AWS and also to external systems.

We are using Step Functions as a core automation tool and it offers great power through its simplicity. It is quite easy to use, although there is a learning curve when using the Step Function scripts. Once mastered, after a week or so, the flows can be built quickly and effectively, allowing us to link a custom business process to multiple other AWS service automatically. 

That done, most business cases can be delivered easily and quickly, all in a serverless and cost-effective way. 

AWS has improved my organization by:

- saving us time, cost, and difficulty by allowing us to use serverless services

- enabling us to assemble complex applications with the minimum of boilerplate and plumbing

- allowing us to pay-as-we-go, so we can rapidly prototype, test, and then deploy to a production application setup

We can run advanced demos with our own data very quickly, showing potential clients the value of our services when we assemble apps for them.

We can show customers clear cost benefits and clearly effective solutions when assembling AWS services together. 

The security has great IAM, roles, and carefully partitioned permissions that allow us to fine-tune control across our applications. External intrusion attempts will never get past application boundaries, which increases trust.

The composition of apps has everything wrapped according to function and applications. We can assemble services as we go. This speeds delivery times by orders of magnitude.

The price forecasting and billing dashboard by service, with billing budgets and alerts, have helped us shut down resources that were accruing costs that we no longer needed, saving us money.

The service's power lies in its simplicity. It is great in that respect. 

The UI is constantly being improved and the billing dashboard has been improved.

Previously, we asked for more end-to-end workshops, examples, and tutorials and these have been added and improved. 

Recently, AWS has been adding improvements across services, documentation, tutorials and we have now got workshops with real-world scenarios which are tremendously useful It makes me a very happy user. 

AWS and the cloud is a space for constant learning and AWS has increased their output in that respect. 

I have been using AWS since 2014.

The solution is very stable. The only errors I encountered were my own. Some services took a few minutes to refresh and propagate across my environments, and once these had propagated, the solutions were rock solid.

The scalability is excellent. At no point have I hit scalability limits with AWS services and features. 

Customer service and tech support were excellent a few years ago when I needed them.

My general process is to explore and check options and run from a tutorial or AWS workshop. If this doesn't get me results, I then do a web search, and I generally find either further AWS docs or a specific example I can use to solve my issue. Within the last few years, my colleagues and I have been able to deliver as required. 

We did previously use a different solution when building AWS Lambda cloud functions. I could compare them directly with Azure Functions and Google Cloud and have found that the AWS Lambda solution is simpler, clearer, deploys quicker, and is generally much more simple and effective to use.

In terms of documentation, AWS is the clear leader. Their end-to-end examples and workshops are much more effective.

AWS services in many cases are deployed to AWS after being validated in Amazon.com's operations. This is evident in the ease-of-use and simplicity of many of the service features, and also in the excellent options offered for more complex services like AWS Forecast, where, for example, a checkbox and drop-down allows the user to add holidays for the country they work in when doing forecasts.

AWS has a stronger focus on business solutions than either GCP or Azure, and in many of the solutions, I have used. This is why in many cases I have switched from using other clouds, to AWS. 

The setup in AWS is a whole service in and of itself. To set up AWS applications, AWS offers a full service, CloudFormation, with some added features that allow us to automate the deployment of the full solution stack.

This makes setup complex, in that one must modify the CloudFormation template one requires and validate it. An external resource was required to check the templates. 

Once this is done, the full solution stacks are automatically deployed. 

I handled the initial setup in-house and by myself.

A recently deployed Step Function automation fulfilled all the needs of a workflow automation engine while remaining below the free operation per month, so we were able to deliver a fully automated application approval process without paying for any workflow automation engine license fees or any server hardware or infrastructure costs.

I would advise others to work from an architecture overview. 

Be aware of the very powerful schema-less data services in the cloud. They can help remove the need for data warehouses - e.g. multi-TB datasets - can be read, joined, queried and made to output daily reports within minutes, on temporary clusters, and that cost less than USD1000 per month. This is compared to the hundreds of thousands of USD for data warehouse licensing costs, plus the schema design time and ongoing DevOps they require.

Moving to serverless operations in the cloud frees up your people to deliver business services rather than spend days and days on administering data centers and the associated concerns that come with them.

I also looked at Azure and it was deemed less reliable than AWS as AWS has not had as many outages and uptime concerns as Azure has had of late. Azure Function Apps, Data Factory, Managed SQL.

Besides Azure, I looked at GCP and VMs, Cloud Functions, Speech-to-Text transcription, BigTable, and BigQuery.

Empower your in-house people to start building and running their workloads in AWS. 

Let them learn as they go. There are multiple online courses for a few dollars that can assist with specific, individual AWS services, as well as running through the AWS workshops. 

Incentivize AWS certifications. Involve your tech people with business solution prototyping. 

Tag your resources, name them well, and set budget thresholds. Assign people to tune the resources being used. Incentivize communications and publish the AWS services and features being used to deliver your business capabilities.

We use Amazon AWS to deploy our architecture.

The most valuable features are CodePipeline, CodeDeploy, CodeBuild, and CodeCommit. We use them to deliver our solution.

The services that we are using have frequent updates, at least twice a year. They provide a new version that has more capabilities or features that fit our process and procedures.

I am an integration specialist and Amazon AWS always seems to be a step ahead of the competition when it comes to the solutions integration abilities with its services.

EventBridge is a tool provided by AWS and it enables integration with the API gateway. We are using it as a solution to our projects and with our clients to integrate with external features, such as B2B or B2C. The Amazon API gateway integrates with EventBridge and other messaging layers. It is a highly integrated solution with those platforms.

I have been using this solution for approximately five years.

The solution is stable.

Amazon AWS has a very easy tool to scale in terms of scaling up and down. We have different options to do this operation and they are very useful.

The technical support has been helpful.

The setup of the solution is not so easy, it requires various skills to complete it. The whole implementation can take a month. However, different parts can take more or less time depending on the knowledge of the implementor.

The messaging layer, in general, is easy today than before when you had to create all the data centers around the world and create the steps to connect the data centers to each other. They have improved a lot over the year but they could still improve more.

Amazon AWS has pay-as-you-go options available.

It is important for people who want to use Amazon AWS to have a very good implementation strategy to make the migration. Amazon has provided some framework to help those wanting to start the migration process.

I rate Amazon AWS an eight out of ten.

AWS is part of our network, we provide services to our internal customers and we have 2,000 plus applications which sit on the VMs and different blade servers. It's a mix, we're using a hybrid environment. I manage the company network and security; we are partners with Amazon AWS.

I value the automation and the stability of this product. Whether it is S3, EC2, the LSG, ASG, for us it's all good to implement.

AWS cloud has an issue with accessibility to the customer, it's very limited and if there's an internal issue, we won't know about it because they don't expose their APIs to many things. This is a generic cloud problem for all cloud products. It's not just AWS. It's Azure, Google, all of them have the same problem. They will never give you any information, and you can't even check their logs properly. That kind of transparency issue is critical because whether I'm using their infrastructure or not, I should have visibility with regard to what is happening in my network.

I'd like to see compatibility extended to include additional applications which are widely used but not compatible on the public cloud. Without them, you can't build the ecosystems for each and every thing. I realize there are so many applications around and you can't source everything but I'd like to see additional compatibility.

The solution has some limitations because you won't have the space for some of the applications. For example, Google is the only provider with a VMware product line. Some of the applications still need a physical server.

I've been using this solution for six years. 

The support is average, just like other cloud providers. It's not so great but it's average. You can't always blame someone, but cloud architecture is like that. Visibility is an issue. They don't offer the latest services and if you don't know, you can just track back to your VMs or the services which you have deployed. 

The initial setup was quite complex. You're designing something and have downloaded the infrastructure of cloud providers which is always complex. Once you start using the solution it becomes easy. 

It is most cost-effective to go for a long-term license option, that way you get a better deal for the cloud. 

I think at the cloud maturity level, I would rate AWS first, Azure second and GCP has just started. In 2015/16, AWS had a lot of issues, but now they are coming up with better solutions and better flexibility. That said, the transparency issue is still there. 

Azure is good for the Microsoft product line and if you are using that you should go with Azure - they will give you better service. But for third parties, it's the same transparency issue, just like any other cloud provider.

I rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

We use this solution in our company and for our clients' companies.

I like the IAM, the directory, and the storage.

They should implement the command shell by default. As it is now, to open the console, you have to download the command application. When you compare with GCP, they have the command shell inbuilt.

It would make it more seamless for the administrator to include this. There are times where the machine is not connecting and you can't wait for the RDP because you have to create them quickly.

Building a shell directly from the console is a good solution. This is missing by default. there are ways that it can be done and integrated.

I have been working with Amazon AWS for six years.

Amazon AWS is very stable.

It is a scalable solution, but you can only scale-out. You can't scale up.

We have approximately 200 users in our company who are using it.

Technical support could be improved, they could be better. We don't get SLA with AWS.

They give us a specific time for a solution but they don't advise further. We have to check to see if the issue has been resolved. There should be an automatic email to notify us that the issue has been resolved, by default.

The need to work on proactiveness.

I also work with GCP and with Azure.

The initial setup is easy. It is not complex.

We have a team of 50 people who maintain all of our solutions. It's spread across the team to run 24/7.

The pricing is one of the best in the segment.

They have actually reduced their prices, with the exception of the MLD which has increased.

It's by design itself.

They have placed the pricing well for a reduced market.

I would rate Amazon AWS a seven out of ten.

Customers can use it for the web-based management of the product. We also store and retrieve data for their network connections. Also, we use the AI/ML portion called SageMaker to calibrate the algorithms and basically drive automation into the customer's use case. Typically our use cases are in hotels, public transportation, convention centers - anywhere where you are sharing internet connections. For example, hotels, conventions centers - anything where you might have people jockeying for a shared internet connection with possible oversubscription or network congestion. We also have enterprise Work-From-Home users due to the pandemic and they need to continue to provide access to those remotely into their own data center, corporate network, and public cloud.

Flexible fast way to bring up servers and network infrastructure with variable costs.

We use the AI/ML Sagemaker to help us build models. 

We use several feature services on AWS, including Lambda, S3 database, RDS database, Alexa Voice Services and Cognito Gateway. They are all excellent in terms of offering great functionality.

They're pretty good about taking customer feedback and are generally able to productize the requested feature.

The initial setup is straightforward, especially if using Lightsail to start.

The solution scales very nicely.

The stability is good with a large number of Availability Zones WW.

Technical support is helpful and responsive but you must pay for a tiered support plan to ensure response.

The pricing is something you have to watch. You really have to constantly optimize your costs for instance, storage, IP's and things like that. That can become a job in itself to manage just from a budgeting standpoint if you are a moderate to heavy user. However, that's true for Azure or GCP as well. 

If they did more automation on alerting you to cheaper pricing or automated volume pricing based on time/use or even porting you on to on-demand instances automatically, that would be kind of cool. That's something that I haven't seen yet. They could just automatically optimize for your workflow and put you onto a lower-priced instance to save you money.  you Maybe allow you to pick an economy setting, or a performance setting, by time of day etc. something like that. That would be great. Then you don't have to think about it as much as you do in the current iteration.

It would be interesting to have a cost optimized accounting service so that they would come in and help remediate and give suggestions on how to cut costs. I know it's probably antithetical to their bottom line, but that said, obviously, if you take the high road there, you're going to probably keep people, and keep people from switching for lower costs. A lot of times, they can architect a better solution or a similar solution for lower cost and that would lead to customer retention--or maybe a longer term retention discount if youve stayed with them for awhile. That would be helpful if they had that. They have solutions architects, to consult however, they're usually just trying to design the best technical solution as opposed to the most cost-optimized solution. 

We've been using the solution for about four years at this point.

Services are pretty good stability-wise. They've got great redundancy. The one thing I would tweak them is when you're within the region or zone, they make it more difficult for you to do redundant zones, without carrying the IP addresses over seamlessly. That is a little bit of a sticking point, so you could have remote redundancy with the addressing there with it even outside of the AZ's. That would be a lot easier than having to go through the programming of it. 

The scalability is great. You can go from one small instance to GPU, very powerful instances, clusters. There is not any problem with scaling if you can afford it. If you've got the volume, you certainly can scale.

We have maybe a dozen or so customers that will use the product and then access the UI and the management system through the cloud. Then, of course, as developers, we have about 10 to 25 employees that have to use it to varying degrees to support the customers and do development.

I like the tech support. It varies by level in that you've got to pay more to get the immediate response time. Generally, I'd say it's pretty good. Literally phone rings minutes after you log a trouble ticket. They're usually pretty good about escalations and helping. Out of AWS, Azure, and GCP, I'd give them the number two ranking. Azure has good support, however, it's expensive. GCP probably is number three I'd say, of the top three.

We also occasionally use the Google Cloud Platform and Azure, although we tend to use AWS the most. GCP is a little bit cheaper overall, however, then you've got the cost of management that is typically a person so you do need to invest in that. 

We started with Amazon and we've pretty much stayed with them. We've switched to Google and done some work on Azure that was customer driven, however, pretty much our prime public cloud has been AWS.

The initial setup is not overly complex. It's pretty straightforward. 

It's pretty easy to get started. However, you do have to make an investment and learn the different cloud platform's nomenclature. Most of our guys now are cloud practitioners and architects now that they've taken the training. We had to bite the bullet even though we've been users for four years. There is an investment that you have to make on the OPEX side. That's the case for any of the public clouds. Although once you know one, you can pretty much pick up the other ones pretty quickly.

In-house

Have to watch price/billing creep, but there are tools to watch and monitor your usage and billing.  

Azure. GCP

We're a software development group building specialty LAN/WAN optimization solutions, so we don't use a lot of canned products per se.

We do tend to sue reasonably new software versions of the OS...whatever is the latest LTS selections.

If you already have your workload ready, that's helpful, as you can actually trial it under a free tier and then see what the cost is, and extrapolate what the ongoing cost is. In the end, that's what gets you. Being able to do some benchmark testing on how much it's going to cost for your particular workflow across the three public clouds is definitely something you probably want to do. Especially if you're going to scale, as, obviously, it can suddenly creep up to not just tens or hundreds of dollars a month, but thousands a month, depending upon what you're doing. I definitely would recommend doing some reference testing of your workflows before deciding on a solution.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. They're pretty solid. You've got all the services that you can imagine, and then some. There's a very broad breadth of products and services. We haven't had too many SLA issues for recovery or downtime. Maybe we've just been lucky or good so far...

It's a powerful infrastructure as a service solution, IaaS. It offers compute resources, storage, networking, and databases to quickly create your cloud infrastructure.

Apart from the infrastructure as a service, the AWS Lambda, which functions as the service FaaS, is really powerful. 

It's a powerful way of quickly assembling or developing applications, which can be scaled immensely and also at a fraction of the cost because you are charged per the execution time of each function. If you are writing a small function as an AWS Lambda function, then you are paying only for those milliseconds for the time at which it runs. 

It's a very cost-efficient way of running applications in the cloud rather than running an EC2-compute instance, which is charged by the hour or by the minute. You typically have to keep the EC2 instance updating all of the time. Whereas in functions, a function is invoked only when a user is calling it. Or, the front-end is calling the backend function. Lambda is very powerful and it is also typically used as a mobile backend. Essentially, it's a very strong API-based backend for mobile solutions.

It has many choices of computer options, storage options, and even database options.

It's flexible, you can run any kind of workload on the infrastructure.

One feature I would like to see is to have a better or a more user-friendly web console. 

The web console of AWS is not so user-friendly. They can make it more user-friendly, which will be good for administrators or users of AWS.

I have been using Amazon AWS for five years.

We are using the latest version.

It's very stable. It is highly reliable.

It is highly scalable. It's a very powerful platform.

In my previous organization, there were 12 people using AWS.

We have used technical support to an extent, and it's fine. We are satisfied with technical support.

I have used Azure Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and I have a bit of experience with Google Cloud as well.

You have to create an EC2 instance, which is the compute. We have to create that to get the compute platform, but you have to install your application. You have to patch the operating system and you have to upgrade your operating system.

The operating system and upwards is the customer's responsibility in an EC2 instance.

It's a straightforward installation because it's your application and your operating system just like you are on-premises, but you will do it on the cloud through a browser or through a CLI, a command-line tool.

The deployment timeline depends on how complex your application is. Because you are getting the platform from AWS as a computing platform, you have to install your application. It depends on the complexity of your application, so it varies.

Depending on how much you are using it, determines the maintenance. Typically, you will need different roles, you will need administrators who operate this environment, and if you are also developing applications, you would need developers.

The installation and deployment can be done by yourself.

You are not paying a licensing fee, you pay for consumption. You pay for your consumption and it' is typically paid on a monthly basis.

It's a pay-as-you-go model.

Some services are expensive, but the basic infrastructure services are a platform that is reasonably priced.

We plan to continue using this solution, and I would definitely recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it.

I would rate Amazon AWS an eight out of ten.

We use several tools that are part of AWS, which are onboarded to our infrastructure.

We have five or six EC2 instances that make up our AppDynamics component of the link. We are using Paperclip for restoring files, and we use other scripts as well. These are tools that we use from day-to-day.

Using AWS is really helpful for saving costs. We used to have to budget a lot for hardware costs, but now we have EC2 instances that are based on the requirements. For example, if you want one CPU then the cost is based on that, whereas if you require more, then it is automatically included.

There should be seminars and online training sessions available from AWS because a lot of people who are not using it would benefit from having the basic knowledge or basic hands-on experience. If they gain experience with it, then they will be happy to use it in the future.

Training could be in the form of more documentation or training videos. Any increase would make this solution easier to handle.

I have been using Amazon AWS for almost two years.

We use AWS on a daily basis and it is really stable.

We have more than 10,000 users on AWS and we are definitely planning to increase usage. We are the MNP and we have close to one million users in our India location.

Currently, we are introducing our web support and once we need infrastructure to be installed, we will create more instances.

The technical support is really good because whenever we we need help, we just raise a ticket and we get a solution.

I know a little bit about  Azure and GCP, but I am only really familiar with AWS. From our perspective, 60% of users implement AWS.

The initial setup is straightforward. We have the guidelines and documents from AWS, so it is easy for us. AppDynamics is also supporting us for the installation of their components. 

The time required for deployment is not long. Creating an EC2 instance only takes between 15 and 20 minutes.

We no longer need a team for the installation. When we first started, they guided us, and now we have the experience that allows us to do it on our own.

AWS and its cloud platform are getting to be well known through social sites and other sources. It is definitely a product that we recommend. We have experience with it and encourage other people to use it as well.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.