Amazon AWS Reviews

We were not a "born in the cloud" company. Our email server solution was first deployed as on-premise, then as a hosted service on bare metal in a data center and then has been ported to AWS.

The main reason to move from hosted bare metal to AWS was the flexibility in adding storage on demand. However, as we worked with Amazon we realized that it could help improve the scalability and availability of our SaaS offering with the other Amazon services.

Using AWS services has allowed us to have a more atomized architecture, which is allowing us to build scale into each service.

We have deployed a variety of services from AWS. Most commonly EC2, EBS, S3, Lambda, Elastic Search, RDS and NFS Gateway.

The cloud storage based on S3 is one the most valuable services we have deployed since it allows us infinite scale in storage and extremely high durability.

AWS is innovating at a very fast pace. They are very customer focused. They keep up and exceed customer expectations.

There was some new learning in terms of IOPS on the EBS storage. The concept of burstable IOPS was new and we did have a few outages when we ran out of IOPS. After moving to provisioned IOPs for the EBS we have not faced any issue.

Once the IOPs are used up, it takes a long time for the burst balance to be filled up. The only option is to move the data to another disk. This causes downtime. It would be better if we could continue to use at the baseline IOPs.

We did not have scalability issues.

Technical support is responsive, accurate and helpful. Right in line with their philosophy of customer obsession.

We have hosted our SaaS offerings on various data centers in India and the USA prior to moving all the workload on to AWS.

The setup itself was not complex. However, it was an involved exercise moving the email data of all our customers from the data centers to AWS without much downtime.

If you want to move all production loads to AWS, the fastest way forward is lift and shift (which is what we did). However, this may prove to be more expensive than bare metal until the time the solution is updated to use the different AWS services. For example, 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.

We did look at Microsoft Azure, but found that AWS had far more flexibility, options and ease.

There can be a tendency to get excited by all the options available. We advise to start small and focus on the services which solve your core problems.

In fact this is the very strength of the AWS cloud platform; easy and rapid experimentation, start small and scale on demand. The flexibility and malleability of the cloud platform has been an all new experience for us.

We use it to run workload applications, ERP systems, LISAP systems, etc. Everything is on the cloud, including our technical infrastructure for computing, storage, and networking. You can deploy applications like SAP or Oracle or run any website with applications on it.

You can build and release applications quickly with AWS instead of waiting for months to get the necessary hardware. That's the real benefit. The time-to-market for developing applications is much shorter. 

The most valuable thing about AWS is its ease of use and agility. You can quickly deploy it, and there are no upfront costs.

One problem is that the AWS public cloud doesn't have shared storage capabilities. The second thing is the cloud performance versus on-prem. I also have one suggestion that's solution-based. For example, if I want to deploy a medical solution, I would like to have a medical template, so I don't have to set up the infrastructure from scratch. They should provide everything in a pre-defined custom solution blueprint. 

We've been using AWS for four years.

AWS is generally reliable, but we've seen a lot of issues lately, so I would say they have some room for improvement. For example, if the user doesn't configure something correctly, it might fail. Even if AWS is reliable, that doesn't guarantee that all the users will be reliable. They need to make the design foolproof. 

AWS is a cloud provider, so the scalability is almost infinite. Our company currently has around 500 users on AWS. 

We have enterprise support, so they have different levels. If you have enterprise support, they have obligations they must meet. In our experience, Amazon support is above average. Sometimes we get good support. Sometimes we don't. I would rate it six out of 10. 

The AWS initial setup is seamless and straightforward. We set it up ourselves, and we have a 10-person team to manage and maintain the solution. Including design and planning, it took us about three months. 

I rate AWS seven out of 10. My advice is to watch out for the cost. A public cloud means you can use any resource, and there is no upfront cost. That means someone can use an expensive computing solution that might cost them tons of money. No one is holding your hand, so you can use it, but you need to be conscious of the cost before using the solution.

My primary use case was as a place to migrate legacy systems.

AWS has reduced our costs and maintenance requirements. It also allows us to control our load in peak times and automatically increases or decreases your capacity as required. 

The features I have found most valuable are S3 buckets and Lambda services.

An area for improvement would be API creation - a lot of tools are provided, but there can be issues with integrating them. There is also a cost underlay, in that at the end of the day, some costs are not in the picture, so AWS needs to improve its costing toolset.

I have been using this solution for two years.

The stability of AWS has improved over time and can now be well managed.

This solution is scalable to any limit.

I previously used Rackspace Openstack but switched because it required more manpower than AWS, and AWS is more cost-effective and tolerant.

The setup was somewhat complex. It was done in three phases over a year.

This solution reduced our overhead cost by 30-40%.

Technical support is expensive to use.

I evaluated Oracle Cloud, but it was more complex to use and provided a smaller toolset than AWS.

This solution is one of the top tools available for legacy migration. I would rate this solution as eight out of ten.

We use several features of this solution for many purposes. For example, we use CloudFormation for infrastructure as a service, Kinesis for the message queue, Lambda for integration services, and ATC for hosting. 

We also use S3 for storing the data, clustering, Multizone security, AVS to attach hard disk, and assistant.

It is easy to use.

It has many features that we use.

It integrates well.

They upgrade a lot of applications.

If you are familiar with other cloud infrastructures, you can see that it is in need of some enhancements.

It is easy to enhance it to make the clustering easier.

At times, when you use CloudFormation to create five machines with a sequence name, it is difficult but can be done with Terraform easily. 

I would like to see CloudFormation made more in the programming way of thinking. You have some variables, LOB, IF statements, and inheritance, where it's not just the functionality that we have, but gives you the output. They could make it close to the programming language, even if it's a scripting language. They need more control over it such as an If-Then-Else statement and a sub-loop if possible. It will make it easier to create the infrastructure.

I have been working with Amazon AWS for more than seven or eight years.

We are using the latest version.

It is a stable solution.

Amazon AWS is a scalable solution.

I work as a consultant and have a couple of customers. Each customer is of a different size company but they are all over 1,000.

AWS has very good technical support. They react immediately when you need help.

When you speak of installation, you refer to applications already built or software in ATC to be installed. AWS doesn't sell applications, they give you an infrastructure as a service, application as a service, and a platform as a service but they don't give you applications to be installed.

There is no installation required in AWS.

The maintenance required depends on the size of the company. Some larger companies require a larger IT department while others don't require it at all.

A license is required. Some customers will provide their own license and others will purchase it directly from AWS.

I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in it.

I would rate Amazon AWS a nine out of ten.

We primarily use the solution as a cloud computing platform. We use it for database storage. 

Application development and migration form On-Premise to Cloud

The solution is very stable. Its reliability is great.

We've found the product to be very easy to use. 

The solution is scalable. 

The installation process is very simple.

Technical support is very good. 

The product would be better if it was more secure. 

The stability could always be improved upon.

I've been using the solution for a few years at this point. It's been a while. I've had a good amount of time to work with it. 

The solution is very stable. It doesn't crash or freeze. there are no bugs or glitches. It's reliable and the performance is good.

The product is scalable. If a company needs to expand, it can do so with ease. 

We have about 50 people using the solution within our organization.

The technical support on offer from Amazon is very helpful and responsive. I'm happy with the level of service they provide. They are very good. 

We did not previously use a different product. We've always used AWS.

The solution is very simple and straightforward. It's not complex or difficult. A company shouldn't have any issue with the process. The deployment is quick.

Middle level

Calculate form  Physical Server , CAPEX,OPEX

You do need to pay for a license. We pay a monthly fee in order to use the product.

Yes,I study form this ,https://comparecloud.in/

We are using the latest version of the solution. I'm not sure of the version number off-hand. 

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We're very happy with its capabilities. 

I'd recommend the solution to other users and companies. 

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...

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 mainly use AWS for migrating onto the cloud or for analytic services and machine learning. 

I like many features, like the recently released useful analytics features. There are many from the data analytics or database side.

The price could be better. Support for data analytics could be better. I don't see much support for data analytics. They have a lot of support in Azure, but I don't see a lot of innovation on the data analytics side in AWS.

I have been dealing with Amazon AWS for the last two years.

AWS is a stable and flexible solution.

AWS is a scalable product.

Technical support is customer-friendly and knowledgeable.

The initial setup and installation are straightforward. They have very good documentation, and if you can follow the script, you can do it. I was trying to do it with the Datacom script, and I was able to make services like VPC and EC2 in the database cloud seamlessly.

The prices are somewhat on the higher side. It would help if they can bring it down, especially for the sporting segment and for on-demand instances.

I would recommend Amazon AWS to potential customers.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Amazon AWS a nine.