No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

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
7.0
Number of Reviews
261
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

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the S3."
"The ecosystem offered by the product has almost everything."
"AWS is quite good for cloud services such as IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, providing a rich set of services and integrated monitoring tools alongside a competitive pricing model."
"The features with Amazon AWS that I have found most valuable are its flexibility and high availability. These are the most important and attractive points for me."
"This solution is very easy to use and it has a professional interface."
"The features that I have found most valuable are their compute and their Relational Database Service."
"We switched to it because of its ease of use, ease of deployment, and cost."
"Provisioning and resource administration include billing dashboards, which are very extensive."
"There is easy integration with multiple providers and third-party services."
"Ability to quickly create reliable virtual servers."
"It is very stable; it works 99.9 percent of the time, and we are quite happy with it."
"The tourism business is seasonally based, therefore our infrastructure needs are variable, and this service works perfectly for us."
"The most valuable feature for us is the support, which is really efficient."
"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

"It would be better if there was a way to see which components were still on. We have some situations where I forget that some components are turned on. We forget some components are on, and we only see that these components are on when we see the bill at the end of the month. It would also be better if AWS had specialized firewalls or integrations with leading products. For example, a specialized firewall with content filtering. We were looking for some firewall tools, and we saw that AWS doesn't have any specialized firewall tools in its services portfolio. So, we are looking for other tools like FortKnox, Forcepoint, and Check Point because we didn't find the solutions in AWS services."
"There are some limitations for certain applications that happen regionally and it is an issue for us."
"There is no control of downtime."
"Deploying AWS is complex in the beginning."
"One area that could be improved is in data management. They could improve on the data side. For example, I see others with better cloud services and larger data computing capabilities."
"One problem is that the AWS public cloud doesn't have shared storage capabilities. The second thing is the cloud performance versus on-prem."
"Amazon AWS could improve on security."
"I would appreciate it if Amazon AWS made a category for the cheapest server option so anyone can run a small website or similar projects."
"It would be nice to have more built-in suites compared to others. It would enable easier integration."
"I had a few instances where techs on off hours made extremely bad decisions, resulting in extended site outages lasting hours."
"Comparatively, this solution is a bit expensive."
"Vertical scalability is very limited compared with Amazon EC2, which offers many sorts of instances."
"It doesn't offer Elastic IP like AWS. And also we can't configure our server based on region."
"It's often difficult to get timely support with a ticket, they seem to live by phone calls there."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price, in general, could be better."
"You are not paying a licensing fee, you pay for consumption."
"When we shifted the load to AWS we paid a high cost as the mail stores were hosted on EBS. The storage cost drastically reduced after moving to S3."
"They have a pay-as-you-go subscription."
"The solution's pricing depends on your traffic since they charge you based on the traffic, not the servers. The price can go into many, many thousands depending on the traffic."
"We pay a monthly licensing fee. It's below $100 a month."
"The price tends to be higher, but that is a usual case when prioritizing reliable backup solutions for servers and other infrastructure."
"The price can be better."
"The service includes licenses (for operating systems, databases, etc.). Asset management is easier with services like that."
"Comparatively, this solution is a bit expensive."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which PaaS Clouds solutions are best for your needs.
904,680 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business131
Midsize Enterprise48
Large Enterprise120
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise2
 

Questions from the Community

How does OpenShift compare with Amazon AWS?
Open Shift makes managing infrastructure easy because of self-healing and automatic scaling. There is also a wonderful dashboard mechanism to alert us in case the application is over-committing or ...
How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS?
How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS? Amazon AWS offers options both in terms of upgrading and expanding capabilities as well as acquiring greater storage space. These upgrades can ...
Looking to compare Google Firebase, Amazon AWS, and Microsoft Azure
We like Google Firebase hosting and authentication and also the excellent cloud functionality. Our team found the flexibility of handling and dealing with the database through EDL to be very useful...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

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: July 2026.
904,680 professionals have used our research since 2012.