Amazon AWS Reviews

We are customers of Amazon AWS. 

This solution is very easy to use and it has a professional interface. It's easy to access and is secure, two important features. 

The cost of the solution could be improved, it's quite expensive. I find the networking to be overly complex. 

I've been using this solution for four years. 

Amazon AWS is a stable product.

The solution is scalable. 

The initial setup was complex because of the networking setup we needed to create. This could have been a problem with the networking site. 

We currently use Azure as well. AWS offers a very good platform mask and is easy to use. Azure is good for creating virtual machines and creating VLANs is very easy with the Azure site.

I rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

We have a financial services application that's a very broad purpose API set. There are rest APIs for executing financial transactions and maintaining financial data. We also have a series of applications built on top of that.

Every aspect of the product is excellent. We have no complaints.

The reporting aspects of the solution are excellent. 

The documentation that is on offer is very good.

The initial setup isn't too complex. A company shouldn't have any problems implementing the solution.

The stability is very, very reliable.

The payment structure is very good.

The scalability is excellent. There aren't really any limitations

The security right now needs improvement. It's not bad, per se. It's just that there's always room for improvement in security.

I'd love to see guarding duties enhanced.

The pricing could be a bit better. It's something that can always be improved upon.

I've been using the solution for years. It's been a while.

The stability is tremendous. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's extremely reliable. The performance is excellent.

The scaling is phenomenal. We use a lot of auto-scaling. It's really fantastic. If a company needs to expand, it can do so easily.

In our organization, we have 15 users of the product.

It is very seldom that we have had to contact technical support. That said, when we have, it's been very responsive. We are quite satisfied with the level of service provided. It's been very good overall.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. It's not too complex. A company that would like to implement it themselves shouldn't have any problems doing so.

The solution is set up as a pay-as-you-go. It's very convenient.

The pricing could always be better, but it's pretty darn good. We're looking into some options for some pricing improvements through some Amazon partners.

There are not any additional costs to the standard licensing fees.

We did look at other clouds, however, ultimately, we chose AWS. We've been extremely happy with it.

We are just a customer and end-user.

I've been an enormous fan of AWS. It does exactly what I need it to do. It would be hard to convince me to use anything else.

I would recommend other potential users to absolutely do it. It cannot be beaten. I'll never run a data center again.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. We're very happy with the product overall.

Public Cloud

There are different use cases. I have worked on backup and recovery, migrations, created new user accounts from scratch, security and compliance, PCI DSS compliance, and CIS benchmark compliance.

We are dependent on AWS 100%, and it has definitely improved our organization.

It isn't easy to choose a feature as it all depends. For example, there might be a feature for a specific use case. Amazon has many use cases and many deployment types. But overall, Amazon AWS is user-friendly and intuitive. It's also quite secure. The interface is okay and integrates well with other products.

The pricing structure can be improved and made more straightforward. There are so many options, and you have to make several choices before confirming the final cost.

I have used Amazon AWS for about four years.

AWS is the most scalable and reliable cloud computing solution out there.

Tech support is amazing.

The initial setup for Amazon AWS is straightforward.

Amazon AWS is really cost-effective. But the number of choices that you have to make can make the pricing very difficult. You have so many options, so it can be quite difficult to get into pricing.

I would advise potential AWS customers to get the right training for the right solution. The training is, for the most part, pretty easy. It's easier than having a private data center.

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

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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.

Accelerates innovation through fast experimentation cycles in an agile, flexible, and scalable platform.

Enables fast prototyping, simulation, and rapid deployment of infrastructure configurations. Has low risk exploration of new architectural paradigms and technologies (FaaS, Containers, IoT, and Machine Learning) and is easy to integrate with current solutions.

Considering the rate of innovation of AWS and the vast range of services offered (over 15+ categories, 50+ services in 2017) the learning path of customers on the platform is something that can always be improved. Usability through simplification of the interface for the use cases chosen by the customer can be a possible improvement.

The current interface offers several options to select services, solutions, or learning paths. However, the ability to simplify the interface to focus on customer use cases could have an impact on productivity and ease of use.

This is a challenge that I’ve seen all cloud vendor share: Usability and different user experience on their platform is difficult when the span of services is so vast. However, some design thinking “persona” kind of approach could help offer alternative perspectives.

• Since 2012, in prototypes and proof of concepts
• Since 2015, in production applications, advise, and support to some clients.

I’ve never experiences issues with stability related to the AWS infrastructure. The services are very resilient and there are constant reporting and monitoring tools available, a open status dashboard, and a personal health dashboard to receive news on any issues being investigated or sorted out. Even if there have been outages reported in AWS history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... their technical response capabilities have proven outstanding.

I’ve never experience issues with scalability. AWS services offer very flexible set of tools to architect solutions that give the best performance and economic advantages. Combined solutions using elastic computing capabilities, containers, APIs, and even more innovative server-less capabilities (FaaS) can be leveraged to tackle the most challenging use cases.

I previously favored RackSpace and Digital Ocean for simplicity and focus for certain use cases (development prototypes, proof-of-concepts, etc.). I prefer to concentrate investment and training on the same platform when solutions scale and require more complex setups. Leveraging the learning curve on the service offering is increasingly specialized.

The setup is easy and greatly supported by the learning paths offered through the platform. Expertise is required to take full advantage of AWS tools and continuous innovations.

Some customers can become overwhelmed by the range of services, so training and assistance from specialized third-parties is strongly recommended. Even experimented managed service providers can complement internal capabilities and help in the training of internal teams.

One of the advantages of AWS is their high rate of innovation. However, in order to leverage this, internal or external expertise is required. A good partnership is recommended.

On demand, pay-as-you-go pricing is powerful to optimize expenses, but it’s important to keep a technical cost controlling function aware of usage and scale patterns to choose the best pricing mix.

Massive migration to cloud without analyzing the right service for the right usage can lead to higher cost than expected. It is important to get the right advice to match each use case needed to the optimum cloud economics.

Even if a lot of decisions to go to the cloud are based in the promise of lower costs, the true power of cloud services is their flexibility, rate of innovation, and avoiding vendor lock-in if architected consciously.

Even if a lift and shift approach with short schedules can lead to mistakes in choosing services and paying more than optimum, the speed in which you can correct the mistake is not comparable to any other infrastructure option.

This is forcing even the traditional hardware vendors to reinvent their business models and develop financial offerings that include operating expense based financing (pay-as-you-grow) or services based agreements (pay-as-you-go) to make their private cloud offerings competitive.

The other aspect to consider is the managed service required to get the most of this platform. Don’t underestimate the quality of the advice and support required. But at the same time, consider your core business management time released by adopting a platform instead of managing the components internally.

The internal expertise should evolve to understand how to use it best for the business outcomes pursued instead of the technicalities of how to make it. That’s where the right partnerships can be leveraged.

We evaluated Azure, RackSpace, Google Cloud, SoftLayer, DigitalOcean, and Linode.

Test drive it with prototype applications, reproduce development and testing environments, and standardize your stacks to be able to move them easily, if needed. The deeper that the infrastructure-as-code approach is part of your culture, the easier it will be to leverage hybrid opportunities and gain agility.

This solution has been consistently in the top of the IaaS market for the last 10 years.

The whole IaaS model is an invaluable service. The ease of deployment, maintenance, and scalability, and pay as you go model make AWS an amazing platform to build on.

AWS sitting at the core of our service, and we have been able to provide an amazing number of features, that were otherwise very expensive, and labor intensive to put in place, these include high availability, business continuity planning, disaster recovery, among others.

AWS has an amazing feature set but I have not used all of them to be able to have a well rounded opinion about improvement. However, of the features I have used, I would say IAM policies, and cross account access would probably be one of the main areas of improvement. Amazon is working on a "Service Catalog" which could potentially fill some of these holes.

I've used it for three years.

Surprisingly, since starting to use AWS, the process has been quite simple. The deployment was very smooth. Despite this, it does take a bit of getting used to when working with VPCs, and networking in an AWS context, but that's a fairly quick learning curve that can be attained easily.

Like anything, failures happen every once in a while. I have experienced some failed hardware under my instances, which caused a brief outage. The stability of the service, however, is also much more reliant on the architecture of the application than the stability of the AWS infrastructure. In any case, AWS has been quite stable over all.

Scalability is one of AWS' strengths. Scaling resources, be it an AWS EC2 instance, or an RDS instance is a snap. Also, scaling into multiple geographic regions in the world is also possible, and quite a realistic view in that environment.

Customer Service:

My experience with AWS customer service has been stellar. Everyone I come into contact with from Sales, to Technical Support are always friendly, and courteous.

Technical Support:

The technical support team is quite knowledgeable, and there is no question asked that doesn't get addressed with full attention, complete with references, examples, and a recap of conversations that were conducted.

Their technical support processes are clearly well thought out. I can always know what communication to expect, and the level of help that I can expect to receive. I have yet to call them on an issue where a resolution wasn't reached on the first or second contact.

Previously, I used co-location services. The reason I switched is quite obvious:

• Cost
• Constant overheads
• Constant challenge of meeting budgets with consistent cutting edge technology

AWS has removed all these variables, and allowed me to concentrate on growing my services without having to worry about aging servers, or under capacity hardware, etc.

Understanding AWS is actually quite easy. There are some notions that require a bit of previous knowledge to grasp. The good news is that the documentation available about the different services is quite extensive, which can give anyone a head start in launching their AWS services. The complexity of using AWS is directly related to the robustness of the application/service that is being deployed. The more AWS services are integrated together, the more complex the deployment will become.

All AWS services were deployed in-house, with assistance from AWS support teams.

Because there is no initial investment in AWS services (it's a pay as you go service in its basic form) the ROI is immediate. Because AWS costs are consistently being reduced, it is a great way to build services, offered at affordable prices, while still getting good returns on investment.

As mentioned above, AWS does not really have initial setup costs. It's like a utility company; you use the service, and pay for your usage. The daily cost is dependent upon the service being deployed at that point in time. For the flexibility, and consistent cutting edge technology that AWS operates on, it's well worth the price.

I have evaluated Azure, and Google as IaaS. Quite honestly, Google was too convoluted for my purposes, and although Azure had some nice "Microsoft-y" features that AWS doesn't necessarily have, I still felt that it was much easier to get started with AWS, than it is with the other services.

Don't be afraid of "The Cloud". As prominent as it is today, a lot of people, and small businesses, are still afraid of storing their data away from their physical office. There are a ton of advantages in using AWS for your infrastructure instead of on-premises equipment. Give it a serious look before dismissing it. There is a lot that can be added here, but that could be an article all on its own.

The features which are most valuable are EC2, S3, and the networking functionality. EC2 allows me to provision new servers in minutes. S3 allows me infinite, redundant, easily accessible storage. The networking functionality (VPC, Security Groups, subnets, etc) allow me to create robust networks that make sense. Availability Zones allow me to design systems that are resistant to failure.

One example is our devops people can provision new products and systems almost immediately. They have set up an instance of GitHub Enterprise which has become our "source of truth." We have created proofs-of-concept in hours to days to test and evaluate new products across the enterprise. We have been able to leverage the agility of AWS to work faster and, in some cases, "fail fast" so we can get on to the next thing, which works.

Probably customer education and awareness, especially in the Cyber Security area. Many people are mistrustful of public cloud offerings or misunderstand how things work. We'd like to use AWS a lot more for various workloads, but gaining approval to do the things we want to do is currently our biggest roadblock. This isn't necessarily AWS's fault, but hopefully they have the capacity to gain acceptance in the broader Cyber Security community.

I have been using the product for two years.

Our main issues are learning how to deploy the most efficiently. We use Puppet and Jenkins to deploy. Other issues are employee awareness and training (which instance type to use, where to put things, which keys or security groups to use, etc).

No more than expected number of stability issues. We have the occasional EBS volume go down but we expect that.

None at all. AWS is infinitely scalable. Though on one occasion, our preferred instance type was not available in the Availability Zone we wanted it in.

Customer Service: AWS's customer service is ridiculously good. Back when I was admin of an account that only used a few hundred dollars a month, I got top-notch support from my account manager. He set up a couple of conference calls with Solution Architects with no hesitation. Now I preside over an account with significantly more usage, and the customer service remains great.Technical Support: AWS has some really smart people who can analyse my technical questions and give me a cogent, useful answer in short order. Their tech support is top-notch.

We have also use Terremark e-Cloud, but their cost and lack of features turned us off. I don't believe it was an either-or situation, though. We used both but are moving out of e-Cloud and are staying in AWS.

I was not with my current agency during the initial set-up phase.

The agency used a vendor team. I'm with that vendor team and I think we're pretty good, but I'm biased.

We don't calculate ROI, but AWS definitely helps us fulfull the agency's mission, which is how we measure things here.

I personally have evaluated Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Neither seemed as robust or mature as AWS.

Jump right in and make liberal use of AWS' technical support. Even now, I see people hesitating to ask and trying to figure it out for themselves. AWS is always ready to help. It's both complicated and useful enough that it's very easy to build things in a suboptimal way if you don't think things through and follow their guidance. So get all your hands-on staff to take the training they offer and don't be shy about asking for help. The training is big.

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.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)