Amazon AWS vs Rackspace Cloud [EOL] comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Amazon AWS and Rackspace Cloud [EOL] based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Oracle and others in PaaS Clouds.
To learn more, read our detailed PaaS Clouds Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Q&A Highlights
Question: Rackspace, Dimension Data, and others that were in last year's Challenger quadrant became Niche Players: Agree/ Disagree
Answer: Agree. All those are not true cloud player but somewhere in between hosted cloud and true cloud computing.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"With the pay-as-you-go model, we don't have to predict future IT needs. We can just scale up as we want. That helps with a lot of agility in deploying stuff in our IT infrastructure.""Easy to access and secure, two important features.""It has a lot of new features that make our lives easier in terms of what we want it to do in the house.""It is stable. For the cloud version, we require some installation platforms and we don't have a server with us right now. We require it from Amazon AWS. We can just plan and get the AWS server.""There is less work for the DBAs. Everything is handled in AWS itself.""Amazon AWS has good performance and easy management.""The stability is magnificent, it's spectacular.""The most useful feature of Amazon AWS is it can be accessed from anywhere."

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"The most valuable feature for us is the support, which is really efficient.""There is easy integration with multiple providers and third-party services.""Image backup is a valuable feature. Even though this is a common feature, it is very helpful for us."

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Cons
"We like everything about the solution except for the general price.""There should be seminars and online training sessions available from AWS because a lot of people who are not using it would benefit from having the basic knowledge or basic hands-on experience.""The billing should be more competitive.""It can be daunting because of the number of AWS products there are.""Instead of using some third-party solutions, Amazon should include them as part of its offering.""It just needs to be improved from the security perspective.""An easier way to determine estimated costs quickly would be helpful.""There is room for improvement in pricing."

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"It would be nice to have more built-in suites compared to others. It would enable easier integration.""It doesn't offer Elastic IP like AWS. And also we can't configure our server based on region."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Be careful with your consumption, especially when you are testing things. Costs can creep up on you relatively fast, without even noticing."
  • "AWS is scalable depending on your needs so pricing is dependant on what you use."
  • "It is decently priced. The competition is also bringing its own cloud offerings, such as from Oracle."
  • "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."
  • "If you can plan capacity for one or three years, you can use the upfront payment option which allows you to save up to 50%."
  • "One of the best thing in Amazon AWS is you are billed for the service you use."
  • "We are reducing costs year-over-year."
  • "Much faster than other solutions at a super low cost."
  • More Amazon AWS Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The service includes licenses (for operating systems, databases, etc.). Asset management is easier with services like that."
  • "Comparatively, this solution is a bit expensive."
  • More Rackspace Cloud [EOL] Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Anonymous User
    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 alluring IT customers. This article give brief history of these cloud hosting service providers and compares the cloud services provided by them. -- Amazon Web Services -- It's hard to find someone who doesn't agree that Amazon Web Services is the market leader in IaaS cloud computing. The company has one of the widest breadths of cloud services - including compute, storage, networking, databases, load balancers, applications and application development platforms all delivered as a cloud service. Amazon has dropped its prices 21 times since it debuted its cloud six years ago and fairly consistently fills whatever gaps it has in the size of virtual machine instances on its platform - the company recently rolled out new high-memory instances, for example. There are some cautions for Amazon though. Namely, its cloud has experienced three major outages in two years. One analyst, Jillian Mirandi of Technology Business Researcher, has suggested that continued outages could eventually start hindering businesses' willingness to invest in Amazon infrastructure. That sentiment gets to a larger point about AWS though - the service seems to be popular in the startup community, providing the IT… Read more →
    Answers from the Community
    Avigail Sugarman
    it_user73665 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user73665 (Works)
    Vendor

    Part of the reason for the change is that Gartner split the Magic Quadrants into two Magic Quadrants this year. One for native IaaS cloud infrastructure and one for Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting. Rackspace lead the market in the latter which is closer to where they have been trying to position themselves.

    it_user8685 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user8685 (Infrastructure Expert at Cloud Counselage Inc. (www.cloudcounselage.com))
    Consultant

    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

    it_user105252 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user105252 (CTO at a healthcare company with 51-200 employees)
    Vendor

    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.

    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer: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 is… more »
    Top Answer: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 be… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
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    Ranking
    2nd
    out of 33 in PaaS Clouds
    Views
    31,029
    Comparisons
    26,409
    Reviews
    25
    Average Words per Review
    531
    Rating
    7.8
    Unranked
    In PaaS Clouds
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Amazon Web Services, AWS
    Learn More
    Overview

    Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an adopted cloud platform that offers more than 200 fully featured services from data centers located across the globe. This is a scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that is utilized by thousands of businesses of different sizes around the world. The product offers a wide variety of solutions for its customers, which allows them to launch applications regardless of their industry.

    The most common use cases for AWS are:

    • Application hosting: Clients can take advantage of on-demand infrastructure to power their applications. The product supports multiple types of apps, varying from hosted internal applications to software as a service (SaaS) offerings.

    • Websites: With AWS, clients can satisfy their web hosting needs through a scalable platform for their websites.

    • Backup and storage: AWS offers reliable data storage services, which allow clients to store their data and build dependable backups for all of their valuable information.

    • Enterprise IT: The product allows companies to host internal- or external-facing IT applications in a highly secure environment.

    • Content delivery: Users who want to distribute content to end users worldwide can do so quickly and easily through the high data transfer speeds of this solution.

    • Databases: AWS offers a variety of database solutions, which include hosted enterprise database software as well as non-relational database solutions.

    Amazon AWS supports a global cloud infrastructure with AWS Region and Availability Zone models, which contribute to the high availability of enterprise applications running on the solution. Amazon AWS has an extensive array of products that serve different purposes, including:

    • Analytics
    • Application integration
    • Blockchain
    • Business applications
    • Cloud financial management
    • Compute
    • Contact center
    • Containers
    • Database
    • Developer tools
    • End-user computing
    • Front-end web and mobile
    • Games
    • Internet of Things (IoT)
    • Machine learning
    • Management and governance
    • Quantum technologies
    • Robotics
    • Satellite
    • Security, identity and compliance, and others

    The products and services that Amazon AWS delivers to these sectors provide a large computing capacity which is quicker and cheaper compared to building a physical server farm. Among the most popular services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, also known as "EC2," and Amazon Simple Storage Service, also known as "S3."

    Amazon AWS Features

    The wide array of products that Amazon AWS offers consist of different functions that utilize cloud computing across different sectors. The features of this solution can be categorized in the following ways:

    • Data and relationship management: With Amazon AWS, companies can manage multiple hierarchies of directory data, they can define attributes for objects and relationships, set custom inheritance rules for directories, and create multiple schemas.

    • Schema management: This group of features allows users to extend their directory schema according to their needs. They can extend it through multiple applications that share a single directory while avoiding duplication of data.

    • Fully managed infrastructure: This feature decreases time and costs for administrative tasks for companies regarding scaling infrastructure and managing servers.

    • Searching feature: The Cloud Directory feature of AWS offers built-in search capabilities which can cover sets of highly connected data and eliminate the need of creating nested queries.

    • Built-in data encryption: Users can benefit from high levels of protection of their data with AWS's products. The data in the cloud is automatically encrypted at rest and in transit through 256-bit encryption keys, managed by AWS Key Management Service (KMS).

    • Object policies: This feature allows Amazon AWS users to organize objects in different hierarchies by providing a framework for applications to evaluate policy assignments.

    Amazon AWS Benefits

    This product delivers various benefits across all industries that utilize its services. The greatest advantages of using Amazon AWS include:

    • High product functionality is supported by machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), IoT, data lakes, and analytics.

    • The solution has a high level of security, which is backed by a deep set ofmore than 100 cloud security tools.

    • Amazon AWS has an easy-to-use interface that makes it possible for clients to host applications.

    • The product is very flexible in terms of which operating system, programming language, web app platform, and database clients can use.

    • AWS is a scalable and highly secure global computing infrastructure, supported by the reliability of Amazon.com.

    • Clients can utilize the Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing tools to personally scale up or down applications, depending on their demand.

    • Users can choose from an array of payment options, including paying for only the services they need, as well as a free trial to select the ones most useful for them.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Greg G., a chief executive officer at a tech services company, ranks Amazon AWS highly, as he states that the solution is flexible, scales well, and offers good stability.

    A technology manager technology at a computer software company values Amazon AWS because it is extremely cost-efficient, easy to upgrade and expand storage with greatly improved interfaces.

    Rackspace is a listed company that specializes in hybrid cloud environments to support your applications and sites. The environments are based on its open-source operating system OpenStack.Rackspace Cloud caters for the private cloud, public cloud, dedicated servers, or a hybrid of platforms.

    Your Rackspace Cloud environment is customizable according to your cloud requirements, and all products work together seamlessly from one portal.

    Sample Customers
    Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.
    3D Capacity, Acquity Group, Axios Systems, Behance, Blastro, Dominos Pizza, and Sage.
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company31%
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    Educational Organization6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization22%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    No Data Available
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business44%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise38%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise27%
    Large Enterprise56%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business73%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise18%
    Buyer's Guide
    PaaS Clouds
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Oracle and others in PaaS Clouds. Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Amazon AWS is ranked 2nd in PaaS Clouds with 250 reviews while Rackspace Cloud [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in PaaS Clouds. Amazon AWS is rated 8.4, while Rackspace Cloud [EOL] is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Amazon AWS writes "Reliable with good security but is difficult to set up". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Rackspace Cloud [EOL] writes "There is easy integration with multiple providers and third-party services". Amazon AWS is most compared with Linode, OpenShift, Microsoft Azure, SAP Cloud Platform and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), whereas Rackspace Cloud [EOL] is most compared with .

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    We monitor all PaaS Clouds reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.