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Amazon AWS vs Rackspace Cloud [EOL] comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon AWS
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
258
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (2nd), PaaS Clouds (2nd)
Rackspace Cloud [EOL]
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Q&A Highlights

AS
Community Manager at PeerSpot (formerly IT Central Station)
Aug 21, 2014
 

Featured Reviews

Asif  Meem - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Machine Learning Engineer at sportsbet
Managed cloud services have helped accelerate experiments with flexible configuration options
Sometimes the costs associated with spinning up a service, especially managed services, have implications. For example, if I create a Glue job, that will create S3 buckets and other resources that have cost implications, but once I clean up a Glue job, it does not delete the other accessory resources. Sometimes, I have to go hunting for what resources Amazon AWS might have provisioned and how it is costing behind the scenes. It can be complex depending on your level of expertise. It is not as easy to get started, especially when it comes to secure practices. Amazon AWS is more hands-on than other platforms.
RS
Director - DevOps and Infrastructure at INTIGRAL
There is easy integration with multiple providers and third-party services
It is very stable. It works 99.9 percent of the time. We are quite happy with it. This product is used to help broadcast football games' live streams, video matches and fantasy games, and it is used extensively. We have almost two million plus downloads, and during peak seasons, we could have 100,000 concurrent users watching 11 different matches.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"One of the most valuable things about it, besides the stability, is that you can forget about infrastructure because you're just doing it on AWS. I remember the times before AWS and other cloud solutions existed, and it was a huge pain to get real hardware, put it inside, configure everything, report everything, and do a scale. It was very, very difficult compared to how it is now. Not even just AWS, but what all these cloud providers are doing, I would say, is a huge advancement in technology."
"I especially like the flexibility and scalability of the solution."
"I like that it helps us do everything really fast, and its advanced services."
"Technical support has been great."
"Cloud Trail API log storage."
"Overall, AWS is pretty good and I can definitely recommend it because it's a proven product."
"The installation is quite straightforward."
"The flexibility of the solution is excellent."
"Image backup is a valuable feature. Even though this is a common feature, it is very helpful for us."
"The most valuable feature for us is the support, which is really efficient."
"There is easy integration with multiple providers and third-party services."
"It is very stable; it works 99.9 percent of the time, and we are quite happy with it."
"Ability to quickly create reliable virtual servers."
"The tourism business is seasonally based, therefore our infrastructure needs are variable, and this service works perfectly for us."
"The new generation of Rackspace Cloud servers are a strong improvement over the first generation."
"Image backup is a valuable feature, and even though this is a common feature, it is very helpful for us."
 

Cons

"As a result of the competency, I believe that most people are now leaning toward Azure rather than AWS."
"AWS is much too expensive compared to current on-premises solution for this type of work. AWS IaaS is a very generic service, which is extremely overpriced."
"Many of our clients prefer in-house cloud rather than the application data sitting in the infrastructure owned and managed by Amazon."
"The networking is overly complex."
"There was some new learning in terms of IOPS on the EBS storage. The concept of burstable IOPS was new and we did have a few outages when we ran out of IOPS."
"The billing should be more competitive."
"There are some limitations for certain applications that happen regionally and it is an issue for us."
"I think Amazon could improve some of the security or fine-grained access for metadata and many other things."
"I had a few instances where techs on off hours made extremely bad decisions, resulting in extended site outages lasting hours."
"It's often difficult to get timely support with a ticket, they seem to live by phone calls there."
"It doesn't offer Elastic IP like AWS. And also we can't configure our server based on region."
"Vertical scalability is very limited compared with Amazon EC2, which offers many sorts of instances."
"Comparatively, this solution is a bit expensive."
"It would be nice to have more built-in suites compared to others. It would enable easier integration."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Technical support is expensive."
"The pricing may vary and is often influenced by marketing strategies."
"We are on an annual subscription for Amazon AWS."
"They have different pricing models for each suite of services."
"The cost is on a monthly basis."
"In terms of price, there are less expensive options."
"The price is quite good; it is a pay-as-you-go option."
"It is very expensive, you have to be very cautious."
"The service includes licenses (for operating systems, databases, etc.). Asset management is easier with services like that."
"Comparatively, this solution is a bit expensive."
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Comparison Review

it_user8586 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
Aug 14, 2013
Amazon vs Rackspace vs Microsoft vs Google: Cloud Hosting Services Comparison
Amazon Web Services, Rackspace OpenStack, Microsoft Windows Azure and Google are the major cloud hosting and storage service providers. Athough Amazon is top of them and is oldest in cloud market, Rackspace, Microsoft and Google are giving tough competition to each other and to Amazon also for…
 

Answers from the Community

AS
Community Manager at PeerSpot (formerly IT Central Station)
Aug 21, 2014
Aug 21, 2014
Agree. All those are not true cloud player but somewhere in between hosted cloud and true cloud computing.
2 out of 4 answers
it_user105252 - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO at a healthcare company with 51-200 employees
Aug 20, 2014
I completely agree. Cloud Computing vending is a scale business. And unless you have the $$ Billions to invest in DCs, interconnects, CDN capacity, as well as in continually investing in the OS and Management software infrastructure, you cannot be anything but a vendor that caters to a particular narrow segment. Its a bit like telephony. You aren't going to do very well going up against GE/Sprint, ATT or Southwest Telecom. BUT if you are an EarthLink, you can play in then niche space of those who want a "socially responsible" Telco. About a year ago, both Rackspace and Centurylink were looking for "capital partners" for future growth investment precisely because of these issues. I don't think they ever raised enough $$. I have been saying for about 5 years now that there is room for 4-5 major cloud vendors and they were going to be: Amazon, Google, Microsoft. and then fighting for the last 1-2 slots were IBM, salesFORCE.com, EMC and perhaps Oracle. Oracle seems to have opted not to keep fighting, and EMC is now more focused on delivering services. So you basically have IBM leveraging its corporate DC and mainframe hardware consolidation capabilities and Salesforce is leverging its lead in CRM to get apps built on Force.com But pretty much everyone else is a niche player. The Future is Platform As A Service. NOT "vms" and Rackspace and Dimension Data all were hoping to move from VMs to PaaS but that's a hard move to make.
it_user8685 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Expert at Cloud Counselage Inc. (www.cloudcounselage.com)
Aug 20, 2014
DISAGREE. VMware is the present and the Future. Be it VMware vCloud and vSphere suites, tough competition for Amazon etc. or be it vCHS. Also, VMware's very own Public IaaS Cloud; vCHS (VMware vCloud Hybrid Service) which will change everything in days to come vis-a-vis Rackspace, IBM's Softlayer etc. Microsoft is not in a competition at all, because it lacks quality compared to the names mentioned above. __Tushar Topale
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Educational Organization
6%
Comms Service Provider
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business132
Midsize Enterprise48
Large Enterprise118
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise2
 

Questions from the Community

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Also Known As

Amazon Web Services, AWS
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.
3D Capacity, Acquity Group, Axios Systems, Behance, Blastro, Dominos Pizza, and Sage.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Red Hat and others in PaaS Clouds. Updated: April 2026.
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