Amazon AWS Reviews

General use cases of AWS are for those needing a managed cloud instance without the bulk costs for a legacy server. We are customers of Amazon and I'm the technology manager. 

The benefit to the company is immense financial savings and the fact that you're able to see your monthly costs before buying anything. The AWS monthly calculator enables you to select your database, servers, volumes, and see how much everything will cost on a monthly basis. You can figure out what you'll be paying, so it enables a comparison; it's usually a third to half the cost of using an on-prem system.

Amazon is easy to upgrade, easy to expand storage and change your EC2 types. Each of those things usually takes at most five minutes to do, whereas on a legacy system you have to actually buy a new system or new hardware and have downtime for installation. Even then it may not be configured the same way and you might end up with a widespread outage. The advantage of using AWS is that all the testing's been done so you have proof that it works. We still do a cursory check, but they don't put anything out there that hasn't been vetted. Plus all the Atlassian tools are on AWS as well. The cloud instances they provide have a very robust network because there are over 160,000 companies that use the tools. Backups are really easy to access as are the automated backups of the VMs and the volumes. We're able to create a new volume from a backup in about two minutes, attach it to the server and view the data side by side to compare the old to the new. It takes 10 minutes total to get all the access needed.

I've had very positive experiences with AWS and it's gotten a lot better over time with their improved interfaces. Everything's all interconnected now and within its own framework. We pull in other tools to the OS such as Docker but AWS provides tools like Yum that enable quick installation of things. It's typically part of the OS. 

While the IAM security key is very secure, they only give you one chance to capture your key. If I'm already logged in and have an email address online, it would be better if it were sent in an encrypted manner to email so that you don't lose the key. I might create the IAM and then perhaps forget to capture it off the screen and then when I do need it, I realize I don't have it and have to create another profile.

I've been using this solution for about 12 years. 

I haven't had any problem with stability. We do multiple zone backups and multiple zone data and we haven't had any problems or slowdowns. We've had dealings with countries like India, where things are generally slower but with AWS there haven't been any issues. There's no wait time.  

Scalability is good. I like the EFS expandable storage because it expands and contracts, you don't have to do anything with it and it's really inexpensive. Somebody may use it for temporary storage where they drop a terabyte of data that they need to give to a customer and then it shrinks back down when they're done with it. It expands and contracts as needed and that's also reflected in the cost.

The technical support is very fast, very efficient and very knowledgeable. Even when I've asked questions and they didn't know the answers, they were able to find someone within 15 minutes that was able to help.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. The main thing is getting the security protocols set up in the proper order, otherwise it won't work. You have to go in and set up the main group and make sure to share it to your database. They've improved their documentation and it's a lot better but still lacks a little in some areas. If you've deployed before, setup takes a couple of hours, otherwise it might take up to a day. It's a lot faster on cloud; if you're working on-prem you have to jump through a lot of hoops because each team has its own security. 

They have scripting tools on AWS which allow you to set up your framework and you can use it as a template. We use an AWS architect for implementation and to make sure all the security is set up. And then we have a DevOps team that manages the OS updates. That's a team of three handling over 100 servers, VMs basically. Once a month they do the non-production patching with the production patching the following week. 

Licensing fees are only applicable if you're using Red Hat or an Oracle database. You have to pay for both of those. If you're using Postgres or MySQL, there are no costs for the actual database application. There are no fees for individuals using Oracle Java, but businesses pay a license. We use an OpenJDK that is vetted by Atlassian so if you don't want to buy Java you can use the OpenJDK.

My advice would be to do some homework, read as much as you can about the setup before you dive in. If you take an hour to review the setup and then put together your own process so you know all the steps required and you use a checklist, it simplifies things. Have some kind of system, whether it's a spreadsheet or a Confluence page where you're documenting the steps and keeping track of where you're at. 

Whenever I'm asked to do something, I can find a tool on AWS that I can vet for our customers, and for that reason, I rate Amazon AWS 10 out of 10. 

We use this solution in our company and for our clients' companies.

I like the IAM, the directory, and the storage.

They should implement the command shell by default. As it is now, to open the console, you have to download the command application. When you compare with GCP, they have the command shell inbuilt.

It would make it more seamless for the administrator to include this. There are times where the machine is not connecting and you can't wait for the RDP because you have to create them quickly.

Building a shell directly from the console is a good solution. This is missing by default. there are ways that it can be done and integrated.

I have been working with Amazon AWS for six years.

Amazon AWS is very stable.

It is a scalable solution, but you can only scale-out. You can't scale up.

We have approximately 200 users in our company who are using it.

Technical support could be improved, they could be better. We don't get SLA with AWS.

They give us a specific time for a solution but they don't advise further. We have to check to see if the issue has been resolved. There should be an automatic email to notify us that the issue has been resolved, by default.

The need to work on proactiveness.

I also work with GCP and with Azure.

The initial setup is easy. It is not complex.

We have a team of 50 people who maintain all of our solutions. It's spread across the team to run 24/7.

The pricing is one of the best in the segment.

They have actually reduced their prices, with the exception of the MLD which has increased.

It's by design itself.

They have placed the pricing well for a reduced market.

I would rate Amazon AWS a seven out of ten.

We use this solution predominately to reduce the amount of effort we need to migrate to the cloud. 

We have had some difficulty figuring out how to monitor how many EC2 instances have been networked into our entire enterprise. We usually try to create a diagram outside of AWS. The types of information we are trying to determine are, for example, what hardware devices are interconnected, and when was the interconnection made.

It is difficult to extrapolate budgeting costs and schedules from the information gathered from the usage of the solution in our systems. We are given a large lump sum of money at the beginning of the year for our budget but it is hard to summarize costs to put down on paper for justification or projections.

I have been using this solution for approximately one year.

This solution is stable and reliable.

We are planning on moving more of our systems to the cloud. Currently, we have approximately 60% of our applications on the cloud.

Our developers found the installation a moderate level of difficulty, there was not anything that was complex. It is helpful to have some tutorials to follow.

The solution is on a pay-as-use pricing model. The price of the solution could always be better but it is priced competitively.

We have evaluated Lambda, and in some cases, it might be a better option than EC2. However, we have decided to go with EC2 because it is closer to a drop-in displacement which works better with our applications, for example, Spring Boot and other similar variations.

My advice to others is EC2 has its specific use case needs like other solutions, such as Lamda. If you have the need for a specific use case this solution could be the right choice. For example, it is possible to have your monolithic application on the cloud and decompose it into your microservice architecture or use it with Lambda capabilities. You can do this and have a high percentage of your application on the cloud. However, you need to be sure it is the right choice, it is something you need to be careful of.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Amazon AWS a seven out of ten.

All of our clients look to migrate their workloads to the cloud and we propose the use of AWS depending on the technology of the client or the workload they want to migrate. Our primary use cases are workloadmigrations, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), sometimes platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS). We use different AWS services, Elastic cloud compute, Web application firewall, AWS firewall, LAMBDA, CloudTrail, and others.

AWS has a lot of services that are very good. One of the services I use is AWS Transit Gateway. This service allows me to communicate between different networks in different accounts. It's good for network communication. The other service I use a lot of is "Control Tower", it's a service used to organize the different accounts our clients have.

With regards to improving the service, I don't see any room for improvement at this time. I love the technology, it is a very good public cloud offering with very good services. Until now, there are no services that I don't like.
One other aspect, it would be good to see the basic service level improved with regards to response time. They don't offer 24-hour support. 

I have been using Amazon AWS for around two years.

AWS is very stable. They have an SLA of 99.99%.

AWS is very scalable.

My experience with AWS support is very good. There are four types of support: basic, free, business and premium. It depends on the level of support you have which determines how quickly they can respond about an incident, ticket or request you have. 

It's very easy to set up services in AWS. Depending on the solution you need to deploy it can be very quick. A virtual machine can be deployed in 5 minutes. 

Our company is a partner with Amazon, we implement in-house. 

What is hard with the public cloud service like AWS, is ensuring you maintain a good budget. Plan the monthly consumption properly. If you don't have the expertise in the cloud, your monthly cost can go very high. It's also very easy to set up services in AWS.

I would also suggest companies look for a good partner that has the necessary experience to deploy the services when moving to the cloud. It's very simple, but you need to design a very good architecture for cost optimization and performance.  

The solution is good for integration. It's very flexible and customizable with other services, public, cloud and on-premise.

This solution has many use cases. Amazon AWS offers a lot of services, all of which are useful. How useful this solution will be for you depends on how it fits your business. 

Amazon AWS is easy to use and in the past two years, I've never had any issues with scalability or stability. 

This solution could be improved by a better licensing model, especially for third-party software. Amazon AWS could also potentially be improved by more free storage, but I think that it's okay when compared to competitors' products. 

I have been using Amazon AWS for more than two or three years. 

This solution is stable. I haven't had any problems with stability in the past two years. 

This solution is cloud-based, so it's scalable. It is elastic, so as soon as you want to increase storage, you do so without any issues. There are about four thousand to five thousand people using AWS in my organization. 

I have contacted Amazon's technical support and it was quite an easy process. You will have a solution within 24 hours. 

I didn't use another fast cloud solution before Amazon AWS. 

The initial setup is easy and you don't really need to install anything. If you understand cloud solutions, you can easily do it yourself. 

I implemented myself, with an in-house team. 

We need to pay for everything. If someone is a personal user, they get one year free. But if you are using this as a professional or enterprise solution, then your company has to pay. The license pricing is comparable to that of competitors'. 

I rate Amazon AWS a nine out of ten, primarily because I have a background in Java. Someone else with more experience in Microsoft technologies would probably prefer Azure. I recommend AWS to anyone considering implementing it because it's easy to use. 

We use Amazon AWS to deploy our architecture.

The most valuable features are CodePipeline, CodeDeploy, CodeBuild, and CodeCommit. We use them to deliver our solution.

The services that we are using have frequent updates, at least twice a year. They provide a new version that has more capabilities or features that fit our process and procedures.

I am an integration specialist and Amazon AWS always seems to be a step ahead of the competition when it comes to the solutions integration abilities with its services.

EventBridge is a tool provided by AWS and it enables integration with the API gateway. We are using it as a solution to our projects and with our clients to integrate with external features, such as B2B or B2C. The Amazon API gateway integrates with EventBridge and other messaging layers. It is a highly integrated solution with those platforms.

I have been using this solution for approximately five years.

The solution is stable.

Amazon AWS has a very easy tool to scale in terms of scaling up and down. We have different options to do this operation and they are very useful.

The technical support has been helpful.

The setup of the solution is not so easy, it requires various skills to complete it. The whole implementation can take a month. However, different parts can take more or less time depending on the knowledge of the implementor.

The messaging layer, in general, is easy today than before when you had to create all the data centers around the world and create the steps to connect the data centers to each other. They have improved a lot over the year but they could still improve more.

Amazon AWS has pay-as-you-go options available.

It is important for people who want to use Amazon AWS to have a very good implementation strategy to make the migration. Amazon has provided some framework to help those wanting to start the migration process.

I rate Amazon AWS an eight out of ten.

There are different services, approximately 150 of them, this solution can provide. There are a few services I most commonly use. I am using it for the virtual servers, Lightsail which are lightweight virtual servers, and a simple storage service which is called S3.

Some of the valuable features I have found to be the virtual server is easy to understand, a secure environment, and AWS has a fast community for finding solutions to problems you might be facing.

I have been using the solution for three years.

We have approximately 15 users using the solution in my organization.

The scalability of the solution all depends on the services that you are using. It is very easy to scale in the cloud if you want to launch multiple servers and if you want to vertically or horizontally scale up the servers. It can support many environments such as Windows and Linux.

The support is fast at responding and resolving issues.

I have used Microsoft Azure and DigitalOcean previously.

The solution is an on-demand service. There is a monthly billing requirement which is for the virtual machines we currently use.

The solution is expensive compared to other providers because you need many of the services and it can add up fast.

I recommend this solution to others and I plan to use the solution in the future.

I rate Amazon AWS a ten out of ten. 

We're building an application and host on Amazon. We are a startup company, so it's in a very early development stage. We're trying to build a particular application for multiple customers. The idea is if you have a VPC for each customer you can segregate each client with their own isolated environment. That's what we're building. We're going to build one application that can be personalized for each client. 

The fact that we as a startup don't have to invest in expensive hardware and a place to house it is very helpful for our small business. It saves us money in the long run in overhead costs and allows us to stay streamlined. There's no heavy investment on the outset and we're really just renting the exact amount of what we need.

AWS is a cloud platform. There are hundreds of tools within it. The cloud handles the updates so we never have to worry about looking for the latest version of the solution.

The solution offers a low footprint. We don't have to come up with a data center ourselves. We basically don't have to own any hardware. We just rent a slice of their platform and we have everything we need.

The biggest area for improvement is the fact that there are a vast amount of tools. The best way to describe it is this: you have lots of Lego pieces, hundreds of Lego pieces, but they all do something specific. However, it's very difficult to understand the purpose of these tools, how are they fit into our environment, our design ideas, etc. To assemble all of these tools, to make them fit into the architectural vision of the company, is very difficult. This is especially true for a startup that doesn't have unlimited resources for research and study. We cannot comprehend the vast amount of information that Amazon produces.

The pricing is very confusing.  

They should really consolidate and make things simpler rather than offer you hundreds of random options. The way everything is arranged really forces users to figure out everything on their own and then, on top of that, to calculate the total costs. There's an infinite number of combinations even just with cost calculations. It's too much. 

While the company has been around for three years and has used the solution since its inception, I have only worked here for three months and have a total of three months of experience with the solution.

The solution is very stable. AWS is quite reliable and we haven't had issues. There haven't been bugs, glitches, or crashes. It works well and as expected.

AWS is extremely scalable. It's designed to be. The sky really is the limit. Users and organizations can expand as much as they like.

We're a small company right now. We're still in the startup phase. We have about 20 people at the moment. We have a dozen developers directly on it now. That said, you probably only need two people for development and maintenance.

We do plan to expand in the future.

Personally I haven't used their support yet. I cannot give more info. I've only been at the company for three months and haven't faced any issues that required me to reach out to technical support.

We are just a startup so the company is young. The founders made the choice to use the database and they've used it since day one. 

The initial setup is both really straightforward and complex. At first, it's simple. However, as you get deeper into the solution and work in all kinds of variations or all kinds of scenarios, things get really complex. The more you have to consider the more complicated it can get. The complexities multiple quickly.

We use Terraform to provision the best infrastructure, which makes our platform really easy to manage in terms of our implementation strategy.

We handled the implementation ourselves. We didn't need to hire on an integrator or consultant to assist us.

The calculating of costs is quite difficult. There are all kinds of variables to consider and it's all very unclear.

It's my understanding that our company is charged a few hundred dollars on a monthly basis.

My understanding is that this product was used from day one. I don't think other options were considered. However, I was not at the company when AWS was implemented.

We're a startup company. It's a very small company with only 20 people. Everything we use is cloud-based. We're simply a customer of AWS. We don't have a special relationship with the company.

I'd warn others considering using the solution that the environment is vast and complex, and a company will need a lot of tools at their disposal for research and to understand the product. If there are people within the organization who already have experience with the architecture or with similar solutions within the AWS environment, that will help make implementation successful. It's important to bring people who have previous AWS architecture experience into the organization.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. It does do everything we need it to do, however, as a small company, figuring it out is a big effort. Making it more streamlined or straightforward in the future would probably give it higher marks.