Amazon EC2 Reviews

We are using Amazon EC2 for automation testing.

The most valuable feature of Amazon EC2 is the virtual machines that are available.

If the cost of the solution was lower it would be a benefit.

I have been using Amazon EC2 for approximately four years.

We have had some downtime using the solution.

I rate the stability of Amazon EC2 a nine out of ten.

We have approximately 25 people using the solution. We do not plan to increase our usage.

I rate the scalability of Amazon EC2 a ten out of ten.

The support in my limited usage was satisfactory.

I did not use other solutions similar to Amazon EC2.

The initial setup of Amazon EC2 was straightforward and did not take long approximately 20 minutes. We deployed the solution manually.

The solution was deployed in-house with two to three people.

We have received a return on investment using Amazon EC2.

Reducing the price of the solution could lead to an improvement.

I rate Amazon EC2 a nine out of ten.

My primary use case for Amazon EC2 is running specific Windows programs on the cloud and collecting data from them.

I would like to see as much automation for data validation as possible in the future.

I have been working with Amazon EC2 for two years.

I think it's a stable solution.

My impression is that this solution is scalable. We currently have four people using this solution and we have plans of expanding that number.

I would rate Amazon's tech support team a nine out of ten, with one being bad and one being excellent.

Positive

The setup was straightforward and easy. While the initial setup was simple, we had some problems with Glue scripts. We ran into some problems, but we found a way around them. 

It took around 20% of our staff to do this deployment and maintenance.

I think this is a very expensive solution and I would like it to be cheaper.

I would recommend this solution to others who want to start using it.

I would rate Amazon EC2 a nine out of ten, with one being poor and 10 being excellent.

We use Amazon EC2 for our virtual machines. For example, if a client wants thier website to work with WordPress, we can use EC2 to spin up a virtual machine and then run WordPress in that environment.

The flexibility of the security features is what is interesting.

The only issue with EC2 is that it makes it difficult to install an LLS certificate on your WordPress website that you have deployed inside that virtual machine. That becomes complicated. S3 is straightforward. But when you're hosting with EC2 then it becomes a problem.

I would like to see more user-friendly WordPress licensing. I am referring to WordPress LLS certificates. WordPress-hosted websites, otherwise, are very stable because the RDP never has these issues. 

I am a software developer, I also use it to host my own application service. In our company, we also create systems. I use it to run other servers inside an EC2 virtual machine. It's accessible, and it is stable.

I have been working with Amazon EC2 for three years.

Amazon EC2 is very stable. I have no issues with the stability of Amazon EC2.

Amazon EC2 is a scalable solution.

We have two Amazon EC2 clients.

I have never had to use technical support for Amazon Web Services in general.

I am a consultant on all of the services that I have listed. F3, EC2, WorkMail. Obviously, F3 goes with Route 53.

I have been working with all of the products listed for three years.

I am starting from scratch with support and everything.

WorkMail is a bit expensive per user. That is something they must correct.

They provide excellent service, but it is too expensive for South Africans. We are losing clients because the price my clients pay for email alone is nearly equal to the price they pay for an entire Microsoft Office license, which includes email.

Where they will have Microsoft Word and other productivity tools, as well as email. And you will pay nearly that much for an email with WorkMail. It's far too costly. That is unaffordable.

The initial setup is straightforward.

It works immediately. It's fast.

You pay as you use it.

I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it.

I would rate Amazon EC2 a seven out of ten.

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.

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.

I've been using EC2 for about seven years.

Amazon support is good.

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.

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.

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

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

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

We are using EC2 for a couple of things. We have integration with Control-M. We have on-prem integration with the on-prem Control-M systems, and we are using EC2 for that. We are also using EC2 for ECS as a worker node.

I like the AMI-related features. A very good feature of this solution is the customizable AMI. It is a very good feature provided by Amazon. The encryption technologies are also very good. We are using KMS, etc.

Load balancing of EC2 is another good feature. If we have a group of EC2s, automated load balancing or auto-scaling is there. Auto Scaling features are very good features.

The connectivity with on-prem is also very much supported. We didn't face any problems there. We had a requirement to integrate with the Control-M system, which transfers the files from one system to another system. For some reason, we were not able to use the ready-made or out-of-box feature provided by Amazon. We had to basically simulate the whole thing with EC2, and we didn't face any problems with this integration.

Another good feature is that we can go and create EC2 over the cloud service. It has also been very useful for data science purposes.

They can build automatic features for ENSS or network drive. They have the Control-M feature. Similarly, they should have a feature for the network drive that can be mapped. I have not seen such a feature. They have a lot of products but those are quite costly. There is no cheaper option available for the EC2 instance for syncing two drives. If these features are available, it would be good.

It is stable. So far, there have been no issues. I didn't get any complaints regarding EC2.

There might be more than 200 people working on EC2.

I didn't contact them for this solution.

It is straightforward. When I first brought up the EC2 instance, I was still learning, and it hardly took 5 to 10 minutes.

I would recommend this solution to others. I would rate it an eight out of ten.

I'm using this solution for my company. We use multiple versions according to our needs and different types of instances and OS, like Windows, Linux, or auto-based.

The solution is deployed on a private cloud.

We have collaborated with AWS on different new service launches and POC, but we are not partners officially. We are a third party.

The most valuable features are the scalability options, low maintenance, and options to upgrade. AWS support is also pretty good. The generation upgrade is pretty simple and standardized. Earlier when I gave a review, we were struggling with it, but now the process is straightforward and standardized. We would love it to be automated, but the way it is right now is okay.

We buy EC2 instances, we buy OS, and we also pay for OS licenses. Support doesn't share or give insights on OS-based issues. That needs to improve because if someone is buying an EC2 instance with the Windows server and SQL license, the client expects that there will be a minimum level of support. We are not looking for Dell support or troubleshooting, but we definitely look for issues that are complex at the OS level, generally.

We would also like to see a better logging mechanism, which can be helpful for the product or generation. An additional feature should be better OS-level support for loggings, which are visible only to AWS support. There should be a way to at least have admin-level access to those so that we can analyze better, or if they come up with the automated generation upgrade. Once you deploy those solutions, you end up using them for years, and in that generation change for those EC2 instances happen. So, automating those will be key.

I have been working with this solution for almost five months.

Support is pretty good.

I have had a little bit of experience with Microsoft Azure. We evaluated it directly in the cloud.

If we compare different cloud providers, Microsoft has its own advantages, but EC2 is catching up quickly.

The advantage Microsoft has just depends on the typical use case. If you are a Microsoft customer and have been a customer for a few years, then you will probably find it easier to handle Azure than AWS. AWS has its certified AMIs available. But native support of Azure is better in terms of those technologies. Similarly, people generally find that AWS is a bit cheaper, but there are personal preferences or design concepts, which will be handled better depending upon the use case or tech stack in different cloud providers.

Gradually, it has improved. Initially, it was complex but it's pretty standard now. It will depend upon who is installing it, their experience, and their familiarity with that cloud provider. Given that we have two rounds of experience, we found it to be pretty straightforward. If someone is new to AWS, it will probably take more time.

The price is reasonable, but there is definitely an opportunity to lower it in instances which are of a higher configuration, because they have been typically used for the long term. There should be custom plans that cater to certain customers who have their uses. The reserved instances prices for SQL server are not that great. We definitely look for such things. 

We are exploring different managed database services, like RDS and Serverless Aurora. There is a scope of implementation on those services, which are pretty new, and most capabilities which are available in instance-based services are not available in Aurora Serverless.

I would rate this solution 7 out of 10. 

I will say AWS EC2 is a great place to start. Microsoft Azure is also good. The solution will be dependent upon the exact use case, but AWS EC2 is a good place to start.

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.

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.

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. 

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

I have been using Amazon AWS for 3 years.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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

The solution has ease of deployment and good documentation.

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.

I have been using Amazon EC2 for seven years.

The product is stable.

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

The solution’s scalability is excellent.

Two users are using this solution.

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

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

We chose Amazon EC2 because of easy management.

The initial setup is a little complex.

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

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.

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.