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Amazon AWS vs vCloud Air comparison

 

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) (21st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 14.3%, down from 15.1% 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 AWS14.3%
vCloud Air1.1%
Other84.6%
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
 

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.
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

"What I appreciate most about Amazon AWS is that it is a popular cloud platform that is very easy to use based on the segregation that has been implemented."
"AWS has large community support."
"The main reason why we use EC2 is because we are not dependent on maintaining the hardware inside our premises. Also, we have full control over the infrastructure, and we can modify it as per our own requirements."
"Not really, I fell in love with AWS right away: their services, quality and quantity of documentation."
"Its scalability is powerful; we are providing services for people to schedule an appointment for the vaccine and for COVID testing to see whether they are positive or negative, and in one night we can have 240,000 people in one minute schedule an appointment, so I am very happy with the scalability."
"The solution scales very nicely."
"The AWS feature that I most enjoy is Lambda functions. I primarily use serverless components because they allow you to process things without having to compromise on resources like when running EC2 instances or virtual machines. With minimal effort, you can scale up an unlimited number of processes, even concurrently, to process things. I frequently work with web APIs, so I use Lambda a lot in this area."
"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."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"The AWS documentation is written in a way that is not very intuitive. That's an area they can improve."
"I'd like to see integration with MySQL."
"AWS should reduce its cost to become more affordable for small-scale organizations."
"We would appreciate it if the product was cheaper."
"AWS is a good platform for non-MySQL, MySQL, and Hadoop databases, but it’s not as good for RDBMS ones like MS SQL."
"One area that could be improved in Amazon AWS is its learning curve."
"I think the product could be improved by simplifying the configuration."
"The solution could offer better integration capabilities."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Much faster than other solutions at a super low cost."
"The price tends to be higher, but that is a usual case when prioritizing reliable backup solutions for servers and other infrastructure."
"It's expensive."
"This is a subscription-based service and there are licensing fees."
"It could be cheaper, and Amazon could also be more transparent with its pricing. I would first expect any product vendor to give me the utmost transparency on pricing information. There shouldn't be any hidden costs. Their service offerings have a bit of segmentation, and they focus more on SMBs. They brought them onto the cloud and encouraged them to use solutions on the cloud. But strategically, they should probably improve that and offer some credits."
"This is not an expensive product but it would be an improvement if the price were cheaper."
"The solution is expensive, and I rate it an eight out of ten."
"Amazon AWS has pay-as-you-go options available."
Information not available
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Comparison Review

it_user8586 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
Aug 14, 2013
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
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
No data available
 

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.
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: August 2026.
908,877 professionals have used our research since 2012.