Amazon AWS Reviews

We provide services to clients using Amazon AWS and I've also used it for our own applications.

AWS aligns very well with agile and DevOps practices, as well as and cloud-native principles like infrastructure as code. In short, it helps me deliver my product faster to market.

There are a lot of features that I really like including ease of deployment, ease of build and release, and also that it is heavily focused on a PaaS or SaaS model. All I have to worry about is my application and not about the infrastructure.

One of the problems that I have seen is that some of the products are not as mature as others. For example, their API Gateway is not as mature as Kong, and their version control system is not at mature as GitHub. It's the same thing with their databases like DynamoDB, which is not as mature as MongoDB. Once we have equality in products between on-premises and cloud, this system will be a very good proposition.

I have been working with Amazon AWS for about five years.

As the majority of products on AWS are PaaS or SaaS offerings, scalability is not a big concern. For some of the services, you have to give them notice if you want to scale them beyond certain limits.

I have been in contact with technical support and they are quite good at responding.

The initial setup is not complex. In fact, I would say that it is relatively easy.

The time required for deployment depends on which products are selected. Some take minutes, whereas others can take hours.

My advice for anybody who is considering AWS is to try exploring and use it. I think that it will save you a lot of time.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Amount of services, fully-managed services, and the power of Infrastructure as code (deployment and automation). AWS has many atomic services (Lambda, SNS, SQS. and so on…).

Migration of On Premise Data Center to AWS to allow cost optimization, and full operational automation to focus on experimentation and innovation.

Cross account possibilities for a big IT organization (user management, resources management, etc.).

It would be nice to be able to test Direct Connect without having to pay a line. Also, the possibility to use VPC Peering with one point VPN Gateway (for the moment, impossible).

More than one year.

Not yet.

Not when we know scalability optimization and processes.

I have not call AWS support yet, but it seems to be very fast according to the various returns I had.

Switched to be more global (AWS Region) and more to the way of a serverless paradigm.

Very simple, an e-mail address, a credit card, and the account is open.

The Free Tiers program is great for testing solutions.

Their terms of licencing and reserved instances are very efficient (like Spot Instances for identified workloads).

Not really, I fell in love with AWS right away: their services, quality and quantity of documentation. With the various testimonies that I received, I had no doubt.

The Cloud Adoption Framework and the Well-Architected on AWS documents are a must read.

For one of the clients I worked with, it has provided excellent storage solutions and infrastructure for deploying Java and PHP based applications.

It has helped reduce the cost by rationing the computing power and paying only on a per usage basis, instead of provisioning unneeded, idle, or unutilized computing power that is used only at 20% of its capacity or time.

Additional funds saved can be used to develop applications that add value to the business. Also, its features, such as auto-scaling help to manage capacity automatically.

Another feature that we are fond of is the Cloud Formation tool. It helps to test and develop a working technical environment and replicate and modify it as necessary across various regions, clients, and business units.

Features such as EC2, S3, EBS, Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, VPC (Virtual Private Cloud), RDS (Relational Data Service), Cloud Front, Cloud Formation, Elastic Bean Stack, etc., have been useful for the following reasons:

• EC2: Supports various operating systems, CPU configurations, helps to produce flexible computing power at affordable, customizable rates. You pay for only what you use. No need to pay for unused extra capacity. Build only what you need and pay for only what you use. It can help save tons of dollars in infrastructure cost.
• S3: Low cost, affordable, yet modern storage solution from Amazon.
• EBS: Low cost, yet fast storage solution. It helps to store the needed data in the quickly accessible storage. Also, it helps defending against DDOS attacks.
• Auto Scaling: Helps to quickly scale up, or scale down the capacity as needed. This would help in adding and/or removing computing capacity as per the need and helps reduce cost, yet provide a quick response as needed.
• Elastic Load Balancing: Helps to build redundant, waiting systems for which the demand can be routed as needed.
• VPC: Helps to define our own private cloud with marked input and output ports. Also helps in reducing the electronic footprint and defend against DDOS attacks. Helps to define the private cloud which will provide the needed security and privacy.
• RDS: Helps to dynamically manage the database services. Helps to independently select and/or switch among various database providers such as Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, etc. RDS helps to free up administrators' time by automating tasks such as backup, maintenance, applying patches, scaling, and replication.
• CloudFront: Helps to define cache of data across various locations and helps to improve the latency of applications.
• Cloud Formation: This is the much needed tool for technical architects. Here one can define the technical architecture they need and play around with it until they get a working architecture. Then the working architecture can be copied, reutilized among different regions, business units, clients, etc. This saves cost and time, reduces errors, and improves efficiency. A much needed tool for administrators and architects.
• Elastic BeanStalk: Helps to rapidly deploy applications across various platforms such as Java, .NET, PHP, Ruby, Python, Docker, etc. It also handles load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.

Many of our clients prefer in-house cloud rather than the application data sitting in the infrastructure owned and managed by Amazon. They prefer in-house/hybrid cloud environments.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

We have not used the technical support much. For the initial solution designing and PoC preparation, we contacted the sales and marketing team from Amazon. They were available and provided the necessary support.

We have used Azure and some other applications. We will continue to use them. We like keeping 2-3 vendors to have a healthy competition and see improvements in the products.

The initial setup was complex, as we needed to build the infrastructure from scratch. It would also require expertise in networking and security.

It is very important to safely manage the keys, as otherwise this would lead to costly security breaches. Some amount of playing around with the setup and replicating it via cloud formation will be needed until your architect becomes perfect with the tool.

It is decently priced. The competition is also bringing its own cloud offerings, such as from Oracle.

We evaluated Azure, Apprenda, and Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

Some of our established clients are going with Azure, especially the ones who had established .NET VB environments. Those who need private in-house cloud are going with Apprenda or Pivotal Cloud Foundry. For small to medium customers, AWS offers a good choice and savings.

It depends upon the requirements and the regulatory compliance issues of the customer. For small to medium customers, AWS is a good choice. For Java, PHP based applications, AWS is a good choice. If you need to have your own private, in-house cloud, there are other options.

Everything is moving into the cloud and AWS is the leader. Not understanding puts a person behind.

I've worked with charities so the ability to host a static website in an S3 bucket at very low cost is great. Also, the ability to scale up and down, depending on project and funding status is ideal for the charity sector.

Glacier storage means files that need to be kept for legal purposes (7 years) - but accessed infrequently - can be stored cheaply in Glacier.

• S3 storage buckets
• Glacier storage
• EC2 instances
• Cloud Trail API log storage

Amazon are as innovative as they are able to deliver. Areas that need improvement are dealt with pretty quickly so I have no complaints. Perhaps the fact that they are innovating so quickly can be seen as a problem for organisations that don't invest in their staff?

None. Amazon's cloud is more stable than any infrastructure you will have in your own server room.

It's very easy to spin up virtual machines and deploy load balancers.

Customer Service:

For free support, their forums cover almost every problem encountered by users on AWS. For one-to-one problems, I found their customer service people to be good.

Technical Support:

Technical support is excellent.

I used to use Rackspace but AWS's innovation and range of products meant I swapped over.

It can be daunting because of the number of AWS products there are. It doesn't take long to skill yourself on the basics of what each one does (in the beginning you will probably be using S3, EC2, and IAM and there are lots of short courses or guides to read).

AWS is scalable depending on your needs so pricing is dependant on what you use. Just be careful not to leave VMs running as you can find your next monthly bill a little higher than normal - AWS did cover that with billing alarms so it's not all bad news.

We use AWS for the development of applications and websites for our customers. We produce web applications.

This is a highly available solution with a good API.

The documentation is very good.

Not all of the functionality is available in Europe and our customers in France want to be able to use features that are only available in the US. 

We have been using Amazon AWS for six years.

This is a stable product.

Amazon AWS is scalable. We develop projects for our clients, so the number of users grows each easy client. At this point, there are several hundred users and we plan to continue increasing our usage.

We don't use technical support very much, so I can't properly evaluate them. What I can say about Amazon is that they do not have a larger support team in Europe or even France. If we compare them to others, for example, Google has more support in our country.

AWS is the first cloud provider that we used.

The initial setup is very complex.

The first time we deployed this product, it was long. It took several weeks. Now that we have deployed it for several clients and have more experience, it only takes a couple of days.

We completed the deployment ourselves but there is a lot of documentation so it's possible, but it's better to have a consultant because it's difficult to know how to do it well the first time.

No staff is required for maintenance.

We pay monthly licensing fees.

Pricing is an area that can be improved because it is very complicated. It considers the number of processes, bandwidth, and different kinds of usage. This makes it difficult to predict. When we receive an invoice, there are always surprises. Now that we have used it for a long time, we have more information and are better able to estimate it.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to have a strategy for calculating or monitoring the price. For example, have some alerts set up.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I've used it to create some internal projects for my organization, particularly for designing the infrastructure of those projects.

One feature I find most valuable is the easy deployment by using the channel model for  serverless architecture. Another feature I find valuable is the versatility of the service S3 because it allows you to give permissions to describe the users from their own accounts, from external users, or external accounts.

On the console, they used to have some shortcuts making this solution easier to work with, but now we have been dealing with so many problems on the console, and some of the options are not very useful in my perspective, so they should bring back those options that make things easier to run some of the services.

Most of the time the options are pre-selected, or you have to go with the default settings, but from my perspective, there are some services which are now more complicated to use than before.

An additional feature I'd like to see in the future is more integration with public repositories, though some use their own repositories for security purposes, but I think it'll be easier to deploy services through public repositories.

I've been using this solution for almost four years now.

This solution is stable. I've been using it for a long time and have only seen an outage in one of the regions. It's a good solution.

The scalability of this solution is good.

The technical support of AWS is very good. When I need something, they reach out to me fast.

The initial setup was straightforward. The complexity of the setup will depend on the number of services e.g. it's something that involves a lot of services, it could get complex, but for a complex setup, you could use things like transformation or Terraform because they will enable you to use infrastructure as a code to make it easier. There's a lot of things to configure.

Licensing of this solution is paid on a yearly basis.

I evaluated Microsoft Azure.

This was deployed on the cloud. I don't remember which version because I didn't deploy it. I was not the person running the project of implementing AWS, but I know the client used it, but I don't know which version.

It's not so difficult to use because there's a lot of tutorials.

I'm not completely sure about the number of AWS users in our organization. We have a partnership with them so we have some accounts, but we don't completely have our load on AWS. We are mostly on Azure. Our main server is on Azure. On AWS, we mostly have some internal projects and services, but most of the main load is on Azure.

We have a small workload on AWS. Sometimes we use it to deploy some of our best projects. We use it on some internal projects. It's a random thing so it could be 1,000 users or 50 users. I'll say approximately 200 to 500 users.

We don't require too many people for deploying this solution because our projects are proof of concepts. Up to ten people from different departments would be needed for deployment if it's a business requirement e.g. people from Approvals and Projects, etc.

As for increasing AWS usage, the organization sometimes thinks of moving some of the load to AWS because of good pricing, because currently, our main streams are on Azure, but it's not a sure thing.

I'm unsure if there's any additional cost aside from the need to pay the license annually because I don't directly manage it.

My advice to organizations looking into implementing AWS, especially if they're going to use it on a big scale, is to take advantage of AWS' organization model to make integration with their policies easier. It will also make administration easier for the different accounts, departments, and structure of the organizations thinking of moving to AWS.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are using the solution for our core applications and our core infrastructure.

The product offers a lot of functionality. 

Our vendor who provides us a specific core application uses AWS and it's just simple for us if we use it too. 

The initial setup is straightforward.

The solution has been issue-free. It's very stable and the performance is good.

The solution can get to be a little expensive. 

I've been using the solution for a year and a half. 

The product is stable. There are no bugs or glitches. The performance is good.

We have about 100 users on the solution right now. 

Technical support is good. We have had no issues with them. We are satisfied with their service.

We also use Microsoft Azure. 

The initial implementation process is pretty simple and easy. It's not complex or overly difficult. A company shouldn't have any issues with the deployment process. 

The costs could always be lowered.

How often we pay can vary, depending on the exact service. We pay, for example, both yearly and monthly.

As a cloud-based solution, we are using the latest version all the time. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. 

I would recommend the solution to other users and organizations. 

Customers can use it for the web-based management of the product. We also store and retrieve data for their network connections. Also, we use the AI/ML portion called SageMaker to calibrate the algorithms and basically drive automation into the customer's use case. Typically our use cases are in hotels, public transportation, convention centers - anywhere where you are sharing internet connections. For example, hotels, conventions centers - anything where you might have people jockeying for a shared internet connection with possible oversubscription or network congestion. We also have enterprise Work-From-Home users due to the pandemic and they need to continue to provide access to those remotely into their own data center, corporate network, and public cloud.

Flexible fast way to bring up servers and network infrastructure with variable costs.

We use the AI/ML Sagemaker to help us build models. 

We use several feature services on AWS, including Lambda, S3 database, RDS database, Alexa Voice Services and Cognito Gateway. They are all excellent in terms of offering great functionality.

They're pretty good about taking customer feedback and are generally able to productize the requested feature.

The initial setup is straightforward, especially if using Lightsail to start.

The solution scales very nicely.

The stability is good with a large number of Availability Zones WW.

Technical support is helpful and responsive but you must pay for a tiered support plan to ensure response.

The pricing is something you have to watch. You really have to constantly optimize your costs for instance, storage, IP's and things like that. That can become a job in itself to manage just from a budgeting standpoint if you are a moderate to heavy user. However, that's true for Azure or GCP as well. 

If they did more automation on alerting you to cheaper pricing or automated volume pricing based on time/use or even porting you on to on-demand instances automatically, that would be kind of cool. That's something that I haven't seen yet. They could just automatically optimize for your workflow and put you onto a lower-priced instance to save you money.  you Maybe allow you to pick an economy setting, or a performance setting, by time of day etc. something like that. That would be great. Then you don't have to think about it as much as you do in the current iteration.

It would be interesting to have a cost optimized accounting service so that they would come in and help remediate and give suggestions on how to cut costs. I know it's probably antithetical to their bottom line, but that said, obviously, if you take the high road there, you're going to probably keep people, and keep people from switching for lower costs. A lot of times, they can architect a better solution or a similar solution for lower cost and that would lead to customer retention--or maybe a longer term retention discount if youve stayed with them for awhile. That would be helpful if they had that. They have solutions architects, to consult however, they're usually just trying to design the best technical solution as opposed to the most cost-optimized solution. 

We've been using the solution for about four years at this point.

Services are pretty good stability-wise. They've got great redundancy. The one thing I would tweak them is when you're within the region or zone, they make it more difficult for you to do redundant zones, without carrying the IP addresses over seamlessly. That is a little bit of a sticking point, so you could have remote redundancy with the addressing there with it even outside of the AZ's. That would be a lot easier than having to go through the programming of it. 

The scalability is great. You can go from one small instance to GPU, very powerful instances, clusters. There is not any problem with scaling if you can afford it. If you've got the volume, you certainly can scale.

We have maybe a dozen or so customers that will use the product and then access the UI and the management system through the cloud. Then, of course, as developers, we have about 10 to 25 employees that have to use it to varying degrees to support the customers and do development.

I like the tech support. It varies by level in that you've got to pay more to get the immediate response time. Generally, I'd say it's pretty good. Literally phone rings minutes after you log a trouble ticket. They're usually pretty good about escalations and helping. Out of AWS, Azure, and GCP, I'd give them the number two ranking. Azure has good support, however, it's expensive. GCP probably is number three I'd say, of the top three.

We also occasionally use the Google Cloud Platform and Azure, although we tend to use AWS the most. GCP is a little bit cheaper overall, however, then you've got the cost of management that is typically a person so you do need to invest in that. 

We started with Amazon and we've pretty much stayed with them. We've switched to Google and done some work on Azure that was customer driven, however, pretty much our prime public cloud has been AWS.

The initial setup is not overly complex. It's pretty straightforward. 

It's pretty easy to get started. However, you do have to make an investment and learn the different cloud platform's nomenclature. Most of our guys now are cloud practitioners and architects now that they've taken the training. We had to bite the bullet even though we've been users for four years. There is an investment that you have to make on the OPEX side. That's the case for any of the public clouds. Although once you know one, you can pretty much pick up the other ones pretty quickly.

In-house

Have to watch price/billing creep, but there are tools to watch and monitor your usage and billing.  

Azure. GCP

We're a software development group building specialty LAN/WAN optimization solutions, so we don't use a lot of canned products per se.

We do tend to sue reasonably new software versions of the OS...whatever is the latest LTS selections.

If you already have your workload ready, that's helpful, as you can actually trial it under a free tier and then see what the cost is, and extrapolate what the ongoing cost is. In the end, that's what gets you. Being able to do some benchmark testing on how much it's going to cost for your particular workflow across the three public clouds is definitely something you probably want to do. Especially if you're going to scale, as, obviously, it can suddenly creep up to not just tens or hundreds of dollars a month, but thousands a month, depending upon what you're doing. I definitely would recommend doing some reference testing of your workflows before deciding on a solution.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. They're pretty solid. You've got all the services that you can imagine, and then some. There's a very broad breadth of products and services. We haven't had too many SLA issues for recovery or downtime. Maybe we've just been lucky or good so far...