BharathKumar2 - PeerSpot reviewer
Database Administrator at Cartrack
Real User
Top 5Leaderboard
You can adjust the instance type according to your needs
Pros and Cons
  • "EC2 provides a lot of flexibility. If you don't want to have a separate on-premise database, you can put it on the cloud with EC2. You can adjust the instance type according to your needs. You select a size and get a certain amount of specific memory, CPUs, etc. You set the redirect limit, and from there, you install the software, database servers, application servers, and whatever you want."
  • "The monitoring part could be improved. When we're building and configuring things or doing database replication, EC2's monitoring could provide more information. It's hard to find the information I need in the graphs they provide."

What is our primary use case?

We are using EC2 only for our test and backup servers, not really as a proxy server. Few users are working with EC2. It's only 10 people.

What is most valuable?

EC2 provides a lot of flexibility. If you don't want to have a separate on-premise database, you can put it on the cloud with EC2. You can adjust the instance type according to your needs. You select a size and get a certain amount of specific memory, CPUs, etc. You set the redirect limit, and from there, you install the software, database servers, application servers, and whatever you want. 

What needs improvement?

The monitoring part could be improved. When we're building and configuring things or doing database replication, EC2's monitoring could provide more information. It's hard to find the information I need in the graphs they provide.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using EC2 for about seven years.

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How are customer service and support?

Amazon support is good.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We didn't switch to EC2 per se. We are still using all the solutions we had before. We still have our on-premise databases.

How was the initial setup?

Installing EC2 is straightforward. You set your user access and build it. It only takes about 10 to 20 minutes next. A single person can deploy it.

What was our ROI?

EC2 costs more than typical on-prem solutions, but there are tradeoffs because you can reduce infrastructure and staffing costs.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The price of EC2 is on the higher end. There is no license. You pay for server data and usage like Amazon RDS.

What other advice do I have?

I rate Amazon EC2 10 out of 10. I highly recommend EC2. You should go for it if you can afford it.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Harvinder Singh Bhogal - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Architect at Visionet Systems Inc.
Real User
Top 5
Highly stable, is auto-scaling, and can be utilized in under five minutes
Pros and Cons
  • "I can quickly create a VM instance with just one click."
  • "The availability and response time of the free technical support can be improved."

What is our primary use case?

We use Amazon EC2 for hosting our web fleet in autoscaling mode.

What is most valuable?

The time to Live is minimal. I can quickly create a VM instance with just one click.

I can reduce costs by using fewer instances with a lower workload. In the event of a sudden spike in demand, Amazon EC2 auto-scales, allowing me to pay for the increased load flexibly.

What needs improvement?

The availability and response time of the free technical support can be improved. At times, it is not reachable and there may be delays in receiving a response.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Amazon EC2 for six years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I give the stability of Amazon EC2 a ten out of ten. Any issues we encounter are due to misconfiguration on our part and not the solution.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Amazon EC2 is scalable.

How are customer service and support?

The paid technical support is responsive but the free support is bad.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is straightforward. We need to select a machine size suitable for the AMI we want to use, as well as the desired storage capacity. Then, we can create an image and the solution will be ready for use in just five minutes.

What about the implementation team?

The implementation is completed in-house.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The use of Amazon EC2 does not incur any licensing fees. Instead, we only pay for the number of computing resources that we utilize. However, if we require enhanced technical support, an additional fee may apply.

What other advice do I have?

I give Amazon EC2 a nine out of ten.

Our entire organization is using Amazon EC2.

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: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
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Amazon EC2
April 2024
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MARCOS JUNIOR - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Instructor Coordinator at Elfa Medicamentos
Real User
Extremely scalable, reliable, and simple to set up
Pros and Cons
  • "The initial setup is straightforward."
  • "It is a little too expensive."

What is our primary use case?

We primarily use the solution as a server. 

What is most valuable?

The scalability is very good. 

It is very stable. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

What needs improvement?

We'd like to be able to scale without turning down the EC2 server. As of now, we have to turn it off in order to scale resources and then turn it on again. We'd like to upgrade and/or downgrade the server without shutting it down.

It is a little too expensive.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used the solution for a year or two. I haven't used it for that long. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution is very scalable. I'd rate the scalability a ten out of ten.

How are customer service and support?

I've never used the solution's technical support.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I'm also familiar with other cloud providers. 

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is not difficult at all. It is not overly complex. I'd rate the ease of setup eight out of ten.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I've found the pricing to be very expensive. I find it pricey compared to other options. 

What other advice do I have?

We're customers and end-users.

I'd advise new users to practice sizing and try to keep their environment according to their needs. If you have an oversized server, it will cost too much money.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten overall. 

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?

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Sushrit Moundekar - PeerSpot reviewer
Program Manager at InfoCepts
Real User
Top 5Leaderboard
A secure, scalable, and reliable solution to host the servers for multiple technologies
Pros and Cons
  • "Amazon EC2 is really reliable and provides great flexibility."
  • "The solution’s pricing and downtimes could be improved."

What is our primary use case?

We use multiple Amazon EC2 instances to host the servers for multiple technologies.

What is most valuable?

Amazon EC2 is really reliable and provides great flexibility. It provides on-the-fly scalability, which means I can change the computation of Amazon EC2 on the fly. It is based on a pay-as-you-go model. I can turn it on when I want to use the solution and turn it off when I don't want to use it. I won't be charged for it when I turn it off. Amazon EC2 provides great backups, where I can do daily and weekly backups. If anything gets corrupted, I can restore it using the backup.

What needs improvement?

The solution’s pricing and downtimes could be improved.

I would like to have a better pricing model for Amazon EC2 instances because it comes with different pricing models. The solution's cost differs when you purchase it for one year or three years. I would like to stabilize the pricing model a little bit.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Amazon EC2 for three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Amazon EC2 is a very stable solution.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Approximately, 50 users use the solution in our organization.

How are customer service and support?

I am happy with the solution's technical support, but they should be faster.

How was the initial setup?

The solution's initial setup is comparatively difficult. You need an admin or someone with experience with Amazon EC2 to operate it.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The solution has different pricing models, and its cost differs when you purchase it for one year or three years.

What other advice do I have?

We are using the cloud version of Amazon EC2. I would recommend Amazon EC2 to users looking for a secure, scalable, and reliable solution to host all their servers.

Overall, I rate Amazon EC2 a nine 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: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Matt Hardy - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Manager/Deployment Manager at Hivedome Consultancy Services
Real User
Top 5Leaderboard
A cloud solution to host a web server with ease of deployment and good documentation

What is our primary use case?

We use the solution to host a web server or a demo server. Also, we use it as a restored target for disaster recovery.

What is most valuable?

The solution has ease of deployment and good documentation.

What needs improvement?

The solution could provide a console view. When booting up the machine, you can't see anything happening until it's booted up. You don't get to see what's happening if it freezes while starting.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Amazon EC2 for seven years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The product is stable.

I rate the solution’s stability a ten out of ten.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution’s scalability is excellent.

Two users are using this solution.

I rate the solution’s scalability a ten out of ten.

How are customer service and support?

We contacted technical support for importing an instance but we didn't get a resolution.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We chose Amazon EC2 because of easy management.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is a little complex.

What about the implementation team?

We did the deployment by ourselves with a bit of training. The deployment depends on the project, but it can be done quickly.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

There is no cost involved for EC2, but sometimes you need to pay for products you run within it.

You need to pay additional costs If you're using a lot of outbound Bandwidth. It is difficult to predict the cost, so I suggest setting up account budgets and notifications if you exceed your budget.

What other advice do I have?

Depending upon the use case, it is suitable for disaster recovery. I recommend users set up usage limits or track budgets on-site.

Amazon EC2 has been functional. We repatriate some stuff in-house because of the ongoing costs.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Environmental engineer at Coventry Building Society
Real User
Top 5
Very expensive solution
Pros and Cons
  • "I use it for NextCloud and for developer purposes."
  • "The price could be better, and it could be more affordable. Because I run my own servers, the prices are quite high."

What is our primary use case?

I use it for NextCloud and for developer purposes. Mainly, I've got pipelines and Go CD pipelines.

What needs improvement?

It would be great if Amazon EC2 were available for free. Currently, I only use free resources. To explain, my servers cost me £50 to purchase and configure, resulting in a total cost of £100 per server. In contrast, Amazon EC2 charges me between £500 to £1000 annually for a server.

Therefore, the price could be better, and it could be more affordable. Because I run my own servers, the prices are quite high.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Amazon EC2 for a year now. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability of the solution is okay. I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It is a scalable solution. 

How was the initial setup?

It's not easy to set up, but I'm making it easier. I maintain the solution myself. 

What about the implementation team?

 For deploying the Amazon EC2, it's quick and easy. I use a system called Nixos, which creates the whole server for you based on your configuration.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Amazon EC2 is a pay-as-you-go service.

What other advice do I have?

Overall, I would rate the product a one out of ten. I wouldn't recommend other people to use the solution. My issue with Amazon is not with the product but with the company's ethics. I wouldn't trust them with anything so I would rate it a one out of ten. In January 2020, Amazon closed down a billion-dollar company just because it was a competitor to Twitter, and they thought Donald Trump would get an account on it. They broke all their contracts, destroyed the company, and left them unable to recover. That's why I don't trust Amazon as far as I can throw them.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Subhdip Rakshit - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. DevOps & Cloud Manager at Applied Solar Technologies India Pvt. Ltd.
Real User
Top 20
Has different family types for computing
Pros and Cons
  • "My company uses the tool for cloud monitoring. We have a production, staging, deployment, and testing environment in AWS. However, we do not use the managed service of AWS yet. My team uses the required parameters for security like VPC, firewall, gates of security as well as the external layer of the app."
  • "The tool’s stability could be better."

What is our primary use case?

We have a team to manage cloud solutions. My company uses the tool for cloud monitoring. We have a production, staging, deployment, and testing environment in AWS. However, we do not use the managed service of AWS yet. My team uses the required parameters for security like VPC, firewall, gates of security as well as the external layer of the app.

What is most valuable?

The features depend on the use cases. We have different family types for computing. There is the R series for databases. For general purposes, there are the N series and the C series. RCE is for DL based kinds of things.

What needs improvement?

The tool’s stability could be better.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using the solution for ten years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is stable and I would rate it a seven out of ten. My company is practicing to improve the architecture as per the requirements.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution is scalable. We have already implemented the requirements of production in frontend ALBs. This will help us move as per the request of the microservice and monolithic parts. There are more than 700-800 users for the tool in our company. Our company’s departments use it for different applications.

How are customer service and support?

We manage and do everything on our own. In case we are stuck at any point, we buy tech support from AWS.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is both straightforward and complex. The tool’s Microsoft base and microservices parts are complex while the other monolithic base is really good. The solution’s monolithic base architecture is simple and straightforward.

We use cloud permission for SaaS code and services for which there are templates. My team needs an hour to deploy the entire architecture for any new project. We are able to create insights for new projects.

We have templates on the cloud solution where my team checks the requirements. After pushing the parameters, we can create a new structure for the project in an hour or so. There is no need to manually create or increase anything.

What about the implementation team?

We have in-house strength to do the deployment. My team upgrades themselves with certificate education. Our company doesn’t need third-party support right now. If anything critical arises, then we will buy AWS credit for the support from them.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. I like the product’s performance. We have a different methodology where we check the work and evaluate how it is beneficial and how we can reduce the costs. My company is working on this. We use the solution for temporary use cases. My team uses it to build, produce and monitor the cloud versions. If there is a need to scale up or down, we will do that. Amazon EC2 has auto-load elastic LV.

The solution is stable and we have never faced any downtime with it. We also have an alarm system where we get ticket notifications. Our applications have never been down and we are happy with Amazon EC2.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Chief Technology Officer at Ongil Private Limited
Real User
The ability to bring up servers and then do the computation and deposit means we don't have to maintain a data center
Pros and Cons
  • "The ability to bring up servers and then do the computation and deposit means we don't have to maintain a data center. Everything is virtual and the security is also taken care of. It helps us to achieve compliance. Being a small startup with the security features that AWS provides helps us with compliance."
  • "In terms of improvement, they could build some client-side desktop tools that provide easier connectivity to Amazon."

What is our primary use case?

I primarily use Amazon AWS and EC2 services. The primary use case is to spawn servers quickly with a particular hardware memory, CPU, and storage footprint. It gives me a hardware service quickly, I can get a virtual machine with Linux installed with a particular storage configuration. I can also configure the security and bring it up. 

Practically, it gives me a mini data center in one or two minutes. 

We need to bring a large number of servers to do our jobs. We do a lot of crawling jobs hosted in AWS. We have templates available to us to bring a pool of servers up and running, hardware as a service. 

In our use case, it's not the number of users using the solution, it's more the number of processes that respond. Based on the compressions and the jobs we do or sometimes we crawl, so the scaling is more in terms of the amount of data acquisition we do.

How has it helped my organization?

The ability to bring up servers and then do the computation and deposit means we don't have to maintain a data center. Everything is virtual and the security is also taken care of. It helps us to achieve compliance. Being a small startup with the security features that AWS provides helps us with compliance.

The encryption, storage, physical security, and data security features at the protocol and storage level, helps us as an organization to achieve greater compliance and keep our business running in a secure fashion.

What is most valuable?

The features I find valuable are EC2, the admin control, and the ability to add the elastic IPs and then attach storage; all of those features are valuable. Also, the Admin Control, Cost Explorer, and the billing features are valuable. That gives me the ability to understand the costs. Amazon AWS has some savings plans. 

In cloud computing, people think the cloud is cheap, but you need to know how to use it and configure the right plans. 

AWS Cost Explorer and the billing features are also valuable. 

S3 buckets and fast storage are also very nice features. 

What needs improvement?

In terms of improvement, they could build some client-side desktop tools that provide easier connectivity to Amazon. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Amazon AWS for 3 years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

In terms of availability and stability, they have not been an issue so far. I've used it in all previous organizations for very large-scale deployments and they're working fine. 
We are not seeing any outages because of Amazon, except if we are using spot instances, they can go down at any moment. We will only use these when we can afford server downtime, so not for production. They sometimes can go down for an hour and so on, but other than that the EC2 instances are fairly stable and great, we have not had an issue so far. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scaling is not a problem because they themselves give you Amazon auto-scaling features. Very few users know how to use it properly. Our VM and images should be properly packaged and then you have to configure it. The load boxes have to be configured, you need to do some configuration, then you can basically vertically scale by choosing a server with a larger memory footprint, or you can go for horizontal scaling by adding more configuration into it. It's scaling over the box. 

How are customer service and support?

I've never had to use Amazon support services yet. I've not opened any tickets so far, I don't have first-hand experience of going through the support process with Amazon. I have been supported by their enablement teams that work with startups, they are fairly good. 

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I've been using AWS for quite a while, there are some use cases where I have not directly used any other cloud product so far, I mostly stick to Amazon. 

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is more or less straightforward for a developer. For somebody who is not from a pure development background it obviously requires you to understand what a public IP address is. You need to understand what storage is and then how to use it. It's mostly for developers and administrators, not for a non-technical audience; for people who can configure a server and have technical background. 

What about the implementation team?

We mostly implement everything on our own, we don't have to bring in a consultant. The only time we brought in a consultant from AWS itself was to take up the offer of a free review of our infrastructure and they will help us to optimize. They advise on which plan based on our use case. Other than that, most of the technical documentation is available and we can operate on our own. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

If we already have the script and everything available, the deployment takes no more than half an hour. We already have the templates, but the template development, the scripts, all the tools development will take some time, maybe a month or so depending on the use case. But, once you have them set up, it's basically a matter of 15 minutes to half an hour.
There were no annual or monthly licensing costs as it's completely based on usage. Depending on how many hours of use, the instance we run, and the storage we use, you get a very detailed account of usage in your billing document. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I did not go through an evaluation process beforehand, mostly it was chosen by the organizations. I did evaluate other vendors on cost optimization to see whether switching to another vendor would improve cost.

I wanted to optimize the infrastructure to see whether the problem is with the way we use it or if Amazon itself is expensive. I was able to bring down the cost with some of the cleanups and saving plans they offer. 

What other advice do I have?

We plan to increase usage as our business expands, we will grow with AWS as it expands.
In terms of the EC2 services, it's an amazing product, in terms of the computational power and the flexibility and then the number of features and services they provide, it's awesome actually.

I would rate it a ten 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: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user