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Amazon AWS vs vCloud Air comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 16, 2024

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
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
260
Ranking in other categories
PaaS Clouds (2nd)
vCloud Air
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
21st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Database as a Service (DBaaS) (23rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 13.3%, down from 16.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of vCloud Air is 1.1%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon AWS13.3%
vCloud Air1.1%
Other85.6%
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

MM
Data Analyst at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Cloud training has boosted my data analytics skills and simplifies building small projects
One area that could be improved in Amazon AWS is its learning curve. The large number of services and configuration options can be overwhelming, especially for new users. Understanding its pricing can also be challenging, as costs can add up unexpectedly if resources are not monitored carefully. For data analytics, setting up and integrating services such as S3, Glue, and Athena sometimes requires a good understanding of permissions, data formats, and service configurations. More guided, simplified onboarding for analytics use cases would make the platform more accessible. One additional area for improvement is documentation and service selection. Amazon AWS offers many services with overlapping capabilities, and it can sometimes be difficult for users to determine which service is the best fit for a particular use case. More decision support tools and guided recommendations would help reduce this complexity. From a data analytics perspective, cost visibility could also be improved since analytics workloads can scale quickly. Having more proactive cost forecasting and optimization recommendations would help teams manage budgets more effectively. Another challenging area is IAM and permission management. While Amazon AWS provides strong security controls, configuring permissions correctly can be complex, especially when multiple analytics services need to interact with one another. Simplifying permissions while maintaining security would enhance the overall user experience. The other area I would mention for improvement is the overall user experience. Given the huge number of services, which are truly excellent, it can sometimes feel overwhelming to navigate, especially for a new user that requires much training. A more streamlined interface and clearer recommendations between similar services would make it easier to get started. I would also like to see more built-in cost optimization guidance and cost management tools. Other than that, Amazon AWS is a very good and mature platform. Most of my feedback is about making it easier to learn, manage, and optimize rather than adding new capabilities.
it_user613995 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Solutions Architect - EMEA & APAC at Blue Medora
With the VPC, you can run your workloads in an active state, use it for development work and for hosting SQL/Exchange Servers in IaaS; RaaS/DaaS for DR activities.
All three components of the vCloud Air are equally valuable and important, i.e., IaaS, DaaS and RaaS. I like the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) offering compared to the Dedicated Cloud. It gives me the flexibility to utilize the pay-as-you-go option. You can run your workloads in an active state at reasonable prices. I have seen lots of companies use it for their development work, as well as for hosting SQL and Exchange Servers, i.e., in the active-passive mode instead of Replication (RaaS). Disaster Recovery is also a great feature that is affordable and easy to use. Disaster Recovery is a great component of the vCloud Air, where you can protect the on-premises cloud infrastructure, by providing self-service recovery options using the vSphere Replication. Some of the features that really stand out and I have used in my projects are: * Direct Connect: It provides high speed and private line connectivity. * Offline Data Transfer: For encrypted bulk data transport.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Amazon AWS has good performance and easy management."
"It is highly available and on-demand, so you can scale up and scale down whenever required, and another thing that really attracts us is the pricing, which is based on the actual consumption of resources, and that's what really helps us."
"In summary, this is definitely a product that I recommend because it's stable and the capabilities and features are better than some of the competitors."
"The price point and ease of use are the most valuable features."
"Accelerates innovation through fast experimentation cycles in an agile, flexible, and scalable platform."
"The most valuable features I have found are the Database Migration Service (DMS) for monitoring the host and routing, Route 53, and EC2 tools. The DMS is not available in any other solution that I am aware of. They have a very flexible and professional solution."
"The flexibility of the solution is excellent."
"AWS has reduced our costs and maintenance requirements."
"The Cloud DRaaS solution provided the organization with new levels of flexibility and cost control, together with rapid expansion capability."
"This is the part that should be making admins and CIOs smile."
"VMware Workstation has an interesting feature to manage vSphere infrastructure (and also stand-alone ESXi hosts) that is really powerful and useful, for example to avoid to install the vSphere client (or the integration plugin) just to open one VM console or to change the power status for some VM."
 

Cons

"I have trouble with the AWS command-line interface."
"The cost structure could be better. It needs to be more transparent."
"If you have not had previous training or studied guides it will be a little difficult to use the solution. However, the difficulty also depends on what you are using the solution for. They can improve by providing more documentation, such as tutorials and videos."
"We would like the system documentation for configuring this solution to be improved, in order to provide better process clarity."
"The sorting model in AWS is a little bit complicated. When you are going through any component, you can get some surprising results."
"In terms of additional features we'd like to see, the one thing that comes to mind is better integration with Oracle. We have a lot of Oracle databases, and there is no other option to either migrate to PaaS, stay on-prem, or use Oracle Private Cloud."
"It has the technical support features, but they need to be improved. It has lots of users, but they need to be managed accordingly."
"The solution can get to be a little expensive."
"I feel the user interface/portal can be improved further. I did experience timeout issues and the UI was performing slowly at times."
"I don’t think it is quite where EC2 is with regard to capabilities and features but VMware is investing a lot in vCloud Air."
"It’s a really good idea, but the current implementation is very limited: you can simply see your VMs and just open the VM console."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost is on a monthly basis."
"The price for AWS is good."
"The pricing depends on the workload. For example, if your workload involves Windows technologies, AWS may not be the most cost-effective option. In that case, you might be better off with Azure."
"Amazon AWS is offering different pricing, and saving plans, it's very easy for a customer to consider the Amazon AWS service."
"Amazon AWS is a bit more expensive than Oracle."
"It is much more expensive than any other cloud provider."
"The pricing may vary and is often influenced by marketing strategies."
"It seems to be reasonable. It's the first one that I've used as a cloud platform, so they've set the benchmark for me, and now, I'm comparing everything else to them."
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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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business131
Midsize Enterprise48
Large Enterprise120
No data available
 

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Also Known As

Amazon Web Services, AWS
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.
Lumeta, LifeSite, Clear Tec Solutions, National Physician Services, Queens University of Charlotte, California Natural Resources Agency, Pacific Disaster Center, Seventy Seven Energy Inc., Columbia Sportswear , CSS Corp
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and others in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS). Updated: September 2026.
914,109 professionals have used our research since 2012.