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Atilla Celiloglu - PeerSpot reviewer
Broadcast Technology Director at tv8
Real User
Top 5
A very professional UI, easy to access, provides great security
Pros and Cons
  • "Easy to access and secure, two important features."
  • "The networking is overly complex."

What is our primary use case?

We are customers of Amazon AWS. 

What is most valuable?

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

What needs improvement?

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

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using this solution for four years. 

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February 2025
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Amazon AWS is a stable product.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution is scalable. 

How was the initial setup?

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

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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.

What other advice do I have?

I rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
VP Platform Engineering at Hydrogen
Real User
Reliable with good reporting and good documentation
Pros and Cons
  • "The payment structure is very good."
  • "The security right now needs improvement. It's not bad, per se. It's just that there's always room for improvement in security."

What is our primary use case?

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.

What is most valuable?

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

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and technical support?

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.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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

What other advice do I have?

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.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Amazon AWS
February 2025
Learn what your peers think about Amazon AWS. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: February 2025.
837,501 professionals have used our research since 2012.
reviewer1465647 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
MSP
A robust cloud solution that's intuitive, user-friendly, and cost-effective
Pros and Cons
  • "Amazon AWS is user-friendly and intuitive."
  • "The pricing structure can be improved and made more straightforward."

What is our primary use case?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used Amazon AWS for about four years.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

How are customer service and technical support?

Tech support is amazing.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup for Amazon AWS is straightforward.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
it_user716571 - PeerSpot reviewer
Architecte solutions Amazon Web Services at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
MSP
Terms Of Licencing And Reserved Instances Are Very Efficient

What is most valuable?

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…).

How has it helped my organization?

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.).

What needs improvement?

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).

For how long have I used the solution?

More than one year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Not yet.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Not when we know scalability optimization and processes.

How are customer service and technical support?

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

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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

How was the initial setup?

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

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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).

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: AWS Partner
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Consultant at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Consultant
Accelerates innovation through experimentation cycles in a scalable platform

What is most valuable?

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

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user702306 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user702306Works at a tech company with 51-200 employees
Real User

czxcz

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PeerSpot user
Chief Technology Officer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Real User
An amazing platform to build on but IAM policies, and cross account access needs improvement.

What is most valuable?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used it for three years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

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.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and technical support?

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.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What about the implementation team?

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

What was our ROI?

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.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user194427 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user194427Chief Technology Officer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Real User

Not necessarily anything that other products would lack, it would actually be more of a "nice to have". It's definitely not a deal breaker by any means. I take the idea from the concept that AWS has with AMIs, for instance, or places where there are public repositories of UDF for scripts... same type of thing, for IAMs. there are a lot of out-of-the-box IAM policies that user can benefit from, and rather than re-inventing the wheel, it would be nice if they're compiled in a central place. That said, there's nothing that a Google search can fix :)

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PeerSpot user
Architect at a consultancy with 501-1,000 employees
Consultant
We have been able to leverage the agility of Amazon to work faster. AWS's customer service is ridiculously good.

What is most valuable?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using the product for two years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

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).

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and technical support?

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.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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.

How was the initial setup?

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

What about the implementation team?

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

What was our ROI?

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

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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

What other advice do I have?

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.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: AWS premier partner
PeerSpot user
reviewer1131864 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Director at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Real User
Highly available, good documentation, and comprehensive APIs
Pros and Cons
  • "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."

What is our primary use case?

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

What is most valuable?

This is a highly available solution with a good API.

The documentation is very good.

What needs improvement?

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. 

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using Amazon AWS for six years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

This is a stable product.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and support?

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.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

AWS is the first cloud provider that we used.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What about the implementation team?

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.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Amazon AWS Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: February 2025
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Amazon AWS Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.