Amazon EC2 Reviews

As our infrastructure work is outsourced, it's not easy provisioning servers. Even virtual servers take time. Using serverless architectures means no need to involve the infrastructure team.

The serverless architecture solutions are most valuable, and the ability to start with little cost, and then expand as needed.

I think the whole AWS stack is very disconnected from each other. in the .NET space, everything just works nicely together. In the AWS stack, there is a lot of head scratching. Demos appeared easy, however, once you sit down and build a solution its gets very tricky quickly, and as it's a new technology stack, it's much harder to find best practices for common problems.

In terms of EC2 instances, we did notice a handful of times servers were terminated by AWS due to "health checks." Besides that, I think there were one or two major outages that affected a number of AWS systems for a few hours.

No, the serverless stack is actually extremely impressive with how well it scales.

My experience with technical support from AWS has not been good. It all depends on who is assigned as your solutions architect. In terms of finding ways other developers solved issues or best practices in Google searches, as it's a relatively new technology stack, typically I find many people asking same questions and not many answers.

Prior to the AWS stack, we were mostly a .NET stack. Our company partnered with AWS, and looking at their offerings, seemed just using their EC2 offering would be a waste. Having said that, I think using the Azure platform may have provided a better end-to-end solution.

Starting up an EC2 instance is easy, starting an API gateway is also easy, so is setting up a lambda function and a dynamo store. The problem is, what you have just done, from looking at AWS presentations and tutorials, is a bad way of doing things in AWS. You pick up quickly that ideally everything should be scripted using cloud formations, or beanstalk, or serverless, or swagger, etc., and here is where the complexity lies. To do anything properly for an enterprise company, currently its very difficult. What tools do you use? Will they still be around in six months?

Pricing appears to be cheap, however, it is extremely difficult in calculating what something will cost. Someone accidentally starting a EC2 server could end up costing you notable dollars. Also once you start using services, let's say serverless architecture, you may quickly find you need to build dirty solutions just to keep the price down, or even go back to server based solutions due to costings.

For some services like API Gateway, we did look at some other options, however, the serverless architecture concept was new and not available as a stack with any other company at such a competitive price. Now Microsoft has also joined the concept, and while I have not used the Microsoft offering, based on my other experience with the .net platform, i think it may be a better platform.

For small startups it makes perfect sense. For large organizations with R&D team/budget, it may make sense. For medium-size companies, where they just need solutions built quickly, I am not convinced about AWS at the moment. Looks promising, but it's a very new platform, with issues that come with a new platform.

I believe that cloud solutions are better than physical servers. 

I am concerned about the tool's data security. 

I am using the product for an year. 

I would rate the tool's stability a ten out of ten. 

The solution is fully scalable. We have five to six clients who use the tool. 

The tool's setup is a bit complicated. You need to have some amount of technical knowledge to install it. The deployment gets completed within three months. We need to first connect to the instance and generate a token. Post that we need to connect to the additional server and then to the cloud. 

I would rate the tool a nine out of ten. 

We use EC2 for different kinds of websites that can be hosted, and for other directories. 

I've found this to be a user-friendly solution and I intend to explore it further because I haven't had that much experience with it. 

The first implementation we did was complex. 

I've been using this solution for six months. 

The first deployment was very complicated, but over time it became easier. 
You have to understand the logic. The initial deployment took around two hours but after that we were able to deploy more quickly. It's preferable to use an integrator if you're in a production environment with many customers. 

This is not an expensive solution. 

I rate this solution nine out of 10. 

Our primary use case for Amazon EC2 is for front-end and back-end deployment.

What we have found most valuable is that we have not lost stability in the program. 

I think the pricing needs to be adjusted and security improved.

I have been using Amazon EC2 for a couple of months.

My data science team is using TensorFlow.

I like the setup with Azure more than Amazon EC2 because I am more comfortable there.

I would recommend any solution that helps solve the needs assessment. I would rate Amazon EC2 a seven out of ten.

It has helped to reduce costs with infrastructure.

Scalability, reliability and easy to use settings. These features are essential for our company.

The services our company offers to our users require high scalability. We need to scale our infrastructure horizontally to meet our users' demands and Amazon can offer this type of elasticity with total reliability.

An advantage of Amazon is that it offers a wide range of infrastructure services with an easy way to configure them.

Price and availability.

I think Amazon could offer lower costs for customers who have a high use demand, as in our case. Nowadays, the cost for little use is attractive, but when your company needs more computing power, costs can be very high.

I believe that a significant improvement to contribute to cost reduction would be a wizard that allows the migration of a certain infrastructure configuration for another solution, such as switching EC2 + RDS instances with a LightSail or Elastic Beanstalk.

Regarding availability, a noticeable improvement would be the possibility of more load balancing configurations and the deployment of more datacenters, mainly in Latin America.

We did not encounter any issues with stability yet.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability yet. One of the greatest advantages of Amazon AWS is the ability to grow on demand.

The technical support is very nice and fast, even for unpaid support.

We've used Google Cloud Platform. We switched because Amazon AWS offers more services and a lot more settings.

Initial setup is always a little bit complex, because we use many services, such as database instances, DNS zones, load balancing setup between multi-zones and so on.

Price is attractive, but at a large scale not so cheap, especially if you use many services. Regarding licensing, we don't have any issue with it.

We were using Google Cloud Platform before using Amazon AWS. We've also analyzed DigitalOcean and a Brazilian datacenter named Locaweb.

You have to consider some factors, like scalability of the services offered by your company. If you need to be online 24/7, then you need a powerful and reliable infrastructure.

Our company, Drivver, uses a wide range of services offered by Amazon AWS, from computational instances to artificial intelligence services, so we need a cohesive and concentrated infrastructure in a single IaaS provider.

We used it for one of the supply chain products.

Its ease of use is valuable.

Its price can be reduced. I don't see any other area for improvement.

I've been using Amazon EC2 for a couple of years.

It's stable.

It's scalable. In our organization, almost all people are using it. There are about 1,000 people. We have plans to increase its usage.

I've used their technical support, and I am satisfied with their support.

It's worth the investment.

It's expensive, and it could be cheaper.

I'd recommend Amazon EC2 to others. I'd rate it an eight out of ten.

Basically, whatever we're trying to do with physical VMs on-premise, we can directly replicate them on Amazon EC2.

The solution's most valuable features are the virtual applications and the scalability.

The customization and configuration could be simplified.

Updates could be automated and simplified.

I've been using the solution for four years.

The solution is very stable.

The scalability of the solution is fantastic. It's one of our favorite features.

We've never had to contact technical support.

Previously we were using VMware. We decided to use the current solution to take advantage of its ability to scale.

The initial setup was simple. Deployment was fast. We could do it in about 75 minutes. It might even take as little as five to ten.

We have about five people handling deployment and maintenance. Mostly, they're architects.

We handled the implementation ourselves.

We're charged depending on the run time, but there are other costs as well, including costs for transactions and storage.

We also evaluated all of the other VM's.

We use the cloud deployment model.

I'd advise others to understand the costs involved before implementing the solution. There are transaction and storage costs as well as running costs.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

One way we have used AWS EC2 is to be able to orchestrate the creation and termination of temporary instances used for training and demo purposes. Instead of having to wait on limited internal resources to become available, we can easily create multiple instances for use and terminate them as soon as we’re done.

The ability to quickly spin up instances on demand with zero upfront costs or infrastructure is the most valuable for me. This significantly reduces the time it takes to onboard projects or quickly create POV environments. It also enables a low entry point for users to begin development without significant expertise.

Built-in and/or integration with other services to proactively identify potential failures before they occur. For example, if capacity is low in an availability zone, recommend placements in another zone, or return capacity status before launching new instances.

Yes. Issues with stability have occurred. In some cases, we have seen where instance performance has degraded significantly to the point where they have to be destroyed and recreated. There are ways to mitigate stability issues through the use of multiple availability zones.

Yes. Issues with scalability have occurred occasionally, due to low capacity of specific instance types in some regions.

Technical support via email has been fairly responsive. A response is usually received within 24 hours.

Local VMs were being used before switching to AWS EC2. Local resources were not scalable and increased operational complexity. They were also costly to maintain.

Setup was fairly straightforward. Using the console provides an easy to understand graphical user interface. The command-line and API options tend to be slightly more difficult to use due to the learning curve.

EC2 pricing is somewhat transparent, in that AWS provides pricing for all instance types. However, the number of pricing options can be confusing, i.e., on demand vs reserved vs spot vs dedicated. It would be great if AWS provided a real-time calculator that displayed your estimated usage for a period of time, then notified you before you exceeded your estimated costs. Licenses for some instance types can be included or use BYOL, depending on the vendor.

No.

Take note of usage costs for all related services being used. For example, running an EC2 instance with vendor software may require paying for EBS volumes, Elastic IPs, Snapshots, and other software licenses. Enable Billing notifications to be alerted whenever costs exceed a certain threshold. Lockdown instances to only provide access via tightly controlled security groups. Use public key authentication, whenever possible, and restrict direct access to superuser accounts.

EC2 is an excellent IaaS service enabling quick deployment of applications.