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Scrum Master | Project Manager | SW Developer at Mobi7
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Good availability and reliability, with a user-friendly set of tools
Pros and Cons
  • "The most valuable feature is the availability, as we work in different availability zones."
  • "At times we find ourselves a little trapped, with the lack of customization, for what we need."

What is our primary use case?

I am a software developer and I have experience with several languages and technology stacks. Amazon AWS is one of the technologies that I work with. It's integrated with the solution that we have. It's a continuous integration and deployment pipeline.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature is the availability, as we work in different availability zones.

It has been easy to use, and the tools included are quite friendly.

The reliability and ease of use are the benefits.

What needs improvement?

At times we find ourselves a little trapped, with the lack of customization, for what we need. That doesn't mean that the tool is lacking it means that we are trying to be more creative than the tool and the rest of the market. In cases like this, it is we who need to revise our plans.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been working with Amazon AWS for one year.

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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We are pretty happy with the stability.

The only issue that we have encountered is when Amazon had problems with one of their availability zones that impacted half of the world. We found that we were impacted as well, but it wasn't that difficult for us because we already had a solution with multiple zones. We had a minimal outage, as we were swapping from one server to another. It took less than ten minutes for us, so we were pretty pleased.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It's a scalable solution.

We have both options of vertical and horizontal scalability. Everything that we have needed so far has worked well. We have no complaints.

We are in the process of scaling up. We have an IoT solution and if we translate that to endpoints and devices that are monitored, we would have 70,000 devices, and counting, in the field. In terms of clients, there are 300 to 400, each of them with their own users.

How are customer service and support?

We have contacted technical support and because we are just a small client, rather than a partner, it can take 30 minutes to get a solution. We have not had to use it much to this point, so this may not be a fair evaluation.

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

This solution was already in place when I started with the company. AWS was in-place and they have never switched to anything else.

How was the initial setup?

Our build, or deployment, is dependent on the application, but the pipeline for submitting a new commit and making it a hot deploy would take from five to twenty minutes, depending on the solution.

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

For our infrastructure, the cost is approximately $25 per device, and you have to include the other tools that we have in the cloud, for a total of approximately $200,000 per year. Our tools included several databases and Kubernetes. If the price was a little bit cheaper, I would consider this solution to be a ten out of ten.

What other advice do I have?

I'm not very experienced in the solution yet. I don't have a clear view of all that is offered, but with the experience that I do have, I'm pretty happy with the features and it is difficult for me to find where they are lacking.

Currently, I am switching to Redshift, which is one of their solutions that is already deployed. I can't say that I'm missing anything from their roadmap, so far.

I would rate Amazon AWS a nine 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.
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The main reason to move from hosted bare metal was flexibility adding storage on demand. Cloud storage based on S3 is one the most valuable services we have deployed.
Pros and Cons
  • "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."
  • "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."

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We did not have scalability issues.

How are customer service and technical support?

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

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

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

How was the initial setup?

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.

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

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.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Mithi is an ISV and an Advanced Technology Partner with AWS.
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it_user660045 - PeerSpot reviewer
Google Cloud Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
MSP
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We use this tool to adopt a cloud strategy.
Pros and Cons
  • "Elasticity has always been AWS's mandate. The flexibility of their platform from a systems perspective lives up to its claims."
  • "The networking models used in AWS, while functional, do have room for improvement. This is especially the fact, considering that they are built/presented from a systems perspective."

How has it helped my organization?

I have been providing consulting services around the cloud solution for the past four to five years, during which AWS was the market leader and the de facto cloud service. AWS definitely helped me to help my customers adopt a cloud strategy smoothly and in a timely manner.

What is most valuable?

Elasticity has always been AWS's mandate. The flexibility of their platform from a systems perspective lives up to its claims.

What needs improvement?

  • I would have hoped that their networking model was a little more network oriented and flexible, as is their systems model.
  • The networking models used in AWS, while functional, do have room for improvement. This is especially the fact, considering that they are built/presented from a systems perspective.
  • More granular control of networking, as well as a richer set of networking features, could really go a long way in building globally scalable infrastructures.
  • The Identity and Access Management (IAM) authentication model could use some work as well. The fact that it isn't very straightforward/streamlined to authenticate applications that are not running on AWS infrastructure can complicate things when trying to use different (non-AWS) environments for specific activities. A simple and common example of this is working in a development environment, and having code that relies on interacting with AWS services. Being forced to store sensitive key information in your codebase isn't a very secure manner of operations.
  • Given the recent surge of adoption and interest in containers and container orchestration, Amazon ECS is seen as a proprietary Amazon service. This makes it impossible to use Amazon ECS on other platforms, whether for development purposes, or for rolling out multi-cloud types of deployments. If you use an alternative, such as Kubernetes, this can easily be configured and ported to any environment, as it is an open-source project.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I have not had any issues with stability on AWS. However, it is worth noting that they did have uptime issues in the past. While there weren't many issues, they still did happen.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The only issue that I faced with scalability was due to the soft limitations that AWS applies on the allowed number of resources, e.g., the number of VPCs per account, the number of EIPs per VPC, etc.

How are customer service and technical support?

I do not have much experience working with AWS's technical support. However, their forums are vast and pretty full of useful information.

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

AWS was sort of the first of its kind, so I did not use a different solution previously. However, today I find myself a lot more invested in the Google Cloud Platform, as oppose to AWS.

How was the initial setup?

It was relatively straightforward to install. I have read reviews of others facing issues with getting their accounts approved. However, I never faced such issues.

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

Be careful with your consumption, especially when you are testing things. Costs can creep up on you relatively fast, without even noticing.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

As mentioned earlier, since AWS was the first of its kind, I didn't really have many other options at the time. I remember one of the other players at the time was Rackspace, but they were considerably more expensive than AWS.

What other advice do I have?

Picking a cloud platform is not a process that should be taken for granted. The leading cloud service providers today each have their pros and cons. It's best that you assess your options, and start with the cloud platform that best suits your needs. After that, your next step would be to start considering a multi-cloud strategy.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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EFS is NFS version 4 based however it does not support Windows SMB/CIFS, HDFS or other NAS access protocols.

Cloud Conversations: AWS EFS Elastic File System (Cloud NAS) First Preview Look

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced new Elastic File System (EFS) providing Network File System (NFS) NAS (Network Attached Storage) capabilities for AWS Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instances. EFS AWS compliments other AWS storage offerings including Simple Storage Service (S3) along with Elastic Block Storage (EBS), Glacier and Relational Data Services (RDS) among others.

Ok, that’s a lot of buzzwords and acronyms so lets break this down a bit.

AWS EFS and Cloud Storage, Beyond Buzzword Bingo

  • EC2 – Instances exist in various Availability Zones (AZ’s) in different AWS Regions. Compute instance with various operating systems including Windows and Ubuntu among others that also can be pre-configured with applications such as SQL Server or web services among others. EC2 instances vary from low-cost to high-performance compute, memory, GPU, storage or general purposed optimized. For example, some EC2 instances rely solely on EBS, S3, RDS or other AWS storage offerings while others include on-board Solid State Disk (SSD) like DAS SSD found on traditional servers. EC2 instances on EBS volumes can be snapshot to S3 storage which in turn can be replicated to another region.
  • EBS – Scalable block accessible storage for EC2 instances that can be configured for performance or bulk storage, as well as for persistent images for EC2 instances (if you choose to configure your instance to be persistent)
  • EFS – New file (aka NAS) accessible storage service accessible from EC2 instances in various AZ’s in a given AWS region
  • Glacier – Cloud based near-line (or by some comparisons off-line) cold-storage archives.
  • RDS – Relational Database Services for SQL and other data repositories
  • S3 – Provides durable, scalable low-cost bulk (aka object) storage accessible from inside AWS as well as via externally. S3 can be used by EC2 instances for bulk durable storage as well as being used as a target for EBS snapshots.
  • Learn more about EC2, EBS, S3, Glacier, Regions, AZ’s and other AWS topics in this primer here

What is EFS

Implements NFS V4 (SNIA NFS V4 primer) providing network attached storage (NAS) meaning data sharing. AWS is indicating initial pricing for EFS at $0.30 per GByte per month. EFS is designed for storage and data sharing from multiple EC2 instances in different AZ’s in the same AWS region with scalability into the PBs.

What EFS is not

Currently it seems that EFS has an end-point inside AWS accessible via an EC2 instance like EBS. This appears to be like EBS where the storage service is accessible only to AWS EC2 instances unlike S3 which can be accessible from the out-side world as well as via EC2 instances.

Note however, that depending on how you configure your EC2 instance with different software, as well as configure a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and other settings, it is possible to have an application, software tool or operating system running on EC2 accessible from the outside world. For example, NAS software such as those from SoftNAS and NetApp among many others can be installed on an EC2 instance and with proper configuration, as well as being accessible to other EC2 instances, they can also be accessed from outside of AWS (with proper settings and security).

AWS EFS at this time is NFS version 4 based however does not support Windows SMB/CIFS, HDFS or other NAS access protocols. In addition AWS EFS is accessible from multiple AZ’s within a region. To share NAS data across regions some other software would be required.

EFS is not yet as of this writing released and AWS is currently accepting requests to join the EFS preview here.

Where to learn more

Here are some links to learn more about AWS S3 and related topics

What this all means and wrap-up

AWS continues to extend its cloud platform include both compute and storage offerings. EFS compliments EBS along with S3, Glacier and RDS. For many environments NFS support will be welcome while for others CIFS/SMB would be appreciated and others are starting to find that value in HDFS accessible NAS. In addition, AWS has also added a new tier for inactive data in S3 for nearline storage as opposed to having to use Glacier.

Overall I like this announcement and look forward to moving beyond the preview.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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it_user7707 - PeerSpot reviewer
Owner at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
Amazon Web Services: Security Processes in the EC2 Cloud

Customer trust and confidence is at the heart of Amazon’s business and with so many customers using Amazon’s platforms to run their business securely and efficiently, Amazon has gone to great lengths to operate and manage a comprehensive control environment. The environment supports secure Amazon Web Services cloud web offerings by ensuring that all necessary policies and processes are used in compliance with AWS certifications.

Within the last few years Amazon Web Services security has achieved notable certifications which include SAS70 Type II audits, PCI DSS Level 1 which involves meeting Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards, ISO 27001 for Information Security Management Systems, and compliance within the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) to properly serve government agency FedRAMP requirements for AWS GovCloud on the Amazon platform.

When Amazon introduced Amazon EC2 it started a process rolling for business customers to run their applications in Amazon’s computing environment. EC2 is the Elastic Compute Cloud which allows business customers to access Amazon’s secure cloud environment through a virtual machine. The platform deploys EC2 security which also supports Amazon Web Services for FedRAMP compliance.

Using Amazon EC2 business customers can create an image of their operating system and applications which is known as an Amazon Machine Image. Once the image is created it is uploaded to Amazon S3 which is Amazon’s Simple Storage Service. The AMI is then registered in Amazon EC2 allowing the customer to summon virtual machines as they are needed. The result is an AWS Virtual Private Cloud for business customers to conduct operations without the exorbitant expense of IT infrastructure. For this reason, Amazon must ensure the environment meets all compliance and security standards hence the acquisition of the certification described earlier.

Amazon EC2 Security Processes

Amazon’s approach to AWS security involves layered security processes which maintain data integrity and provide secure EC2 instances while still maintaining configuration flexibility to meet the individual requirements of EC2 business customers.

  • Administration Hosts: For business customers who require access to the management platform, Amazon uses a level of security to accommodate administration hosts without posing a risk to data integrity and other users. Through the use of AWS Identity and Access Management, this is accomplished by auditing all access activity and using a log to track the activity. If the user accessing the management platform terminates their authentication privileges then the privileges are automatically discontinued which ensures secure AWS applications.
  • Customer Controlled Instances: Amazon EC2 allows for virtual instances which are solely controlled by the customer. Business customers exercise full control and at no time can Amazon intervene by logging in to the customer’s operating system. For this reason, a set of practices is in place to guide the customer on authentication processes for AWS VPC in order to access the virtual instances. This involves designing an authentication and privilege system which can be enabled and disabled according to changing needs of virtual machine users.
  • Firewall: As part of the AWS Security Center, EC2 Business customers have access to a complex firewall solution which can be configured to meet the individual needs of each business customer. For example, the firewall for Amazon EC2 is typically configured by default to block all traffic. If the customer wants to allow inbound traffic they must open the necessary ports to allow inbound traffic while blocking unwanted traffic. The firewall also provides a host of options for setting specific protocols for inbound traffic such as by IP address and other identifications. Added security is in place since the business customer must use their x.509 certificate to change firewall configurations.
  • Xen: Another layer of AWS security for EC2 is the Xen Hypervisor which separates different instances running on the same virtual machine. The firewall is situated in the Xen Hypervisor which means packets for instances must pass through the firewall thereby adding enhanced security to isolated instances.

Finally, Amazon Web Services Cloud uses a layer of security known as Amazon EBS or Elastic Block Storage which restricts access to data snapshots to the specific Amazon Web Services account which created it. Business customers can make the data snapshots available to other AWS accounts however; this process should be carefully considered since there may be files with sensitive information.

Prior to releasing Elastic Block Storage to the customer, Amazon wipes old data in accordance with the National Industrial Security Program guidelines. Plus EBS allows business customers to encrypt their data on the block device using algorithms that comply with individual security standards.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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it_user7707 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user7707Owner at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
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Hi Henry,

we'll post something on S3 security as well soon. aws.amazon.com

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The technical support was a 7 on a scale of 1-10, but dynamic usage and flexibility.

What is most valuable?

Dynamic usage and flexibility in choosing configurations. Also the fact that Amazon’s security team is much larger than anything I could ever assemble gives me reliance that this run time environment is going to be more secure than anything I can deploy.

How has it helped my organization?

I needed to stand up a prototype server that did not conform to my corporate IT standards. By using AWS I was able to stand up my prototype in a few hours, run my demo and be done.

What needs improvement?

The connection between the billing console and the management console is not obvious so shutting down a machine was hard to find initially and resulted in excess billing.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using this solution for 5 years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No issues with deployment.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No issues with stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No issues with scalability.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service: Customer service was pretty good. It was responsive but it took 2-3 iterations on the billing/Management issue before they understood the problem I ran into.Technical Support: The technical support was a 7 on a scale of 1-20

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

I have used Amazon Elastic Beanstalk and Windows Azure. My primary choice to use AWS was because the prototype server stack was specified as an AMI (Amazon Machine Image).

How was the initial setup?

If you have not used AWS, its not as straightforward as it could be to choose what stack configuration a particular AMI requires before loading it. OTOH the “Amazon Web Service Pricing Calculator” is currently the gold standard for cloud vendors.

What about the implementation team?

We implemented in-house.

What was our ROI?

Not applicable, the ROI came from the agility to quickly standup the environment I needed.

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

Approximately $200/mo.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I have used Azure, and Horuko.

What other advice do I have?

Use the AWS pricing calculator to understand how the services fit together.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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reviewer1647507 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
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Consistent and reliable cloud computing that could use an improved interface
Pros and Cons
  • "Amazon has a much better understanding of the workflow of data scientists and machine learning processes. This is seen by their SageMaker which offers different versions of the models to be used."
  • "I think that the interface could be improved."

What is our primary use case?

Propension ML model implementation, so the tech stack involves ETL, storage and computation capabilities for model design, implemented solution also involves pipelines and events handler for automated runs

How has it helped my organization?

Development of the product has been consistent which is beneficial for data engineers unlike Azure which has changed a lot, causing them much confusion.

What is most valuable?

Amazon has a much better understanding of the workflow of data scientists and machine learning processes. This is seen by their SageMaker which offers different versions of the models to be used.

What needs improvement?

I think that the interface could be improved.

Additionally, they lack good connectors with services within other clouds. For example, it does not integrate well with Power BI which is a Microsoft service.

Sometimes, some of their services can be too complex/technical. It's almost like they tried taking a microservice approach meanwhile the users want a little more integration

In other words the multi-cloud approach is not robustly promoted as there is a noticeable difference in ease of use.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using this solution for eight months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

just one event where the whole service was down, although im not sure if it was anticipated by the service due to not being the actual service administrator

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

very good, the tier we used is one of the most basic and still performed with no problems

How are customer service and support?

never had experience with customer service or support

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

How was the initial setup?

pretty straight forward, although this project was 2nd one to be implemented on this cloud, so the customer company had already been up the adoption curve of the service

What about the implementation team?

we provide the implementation as a consulting company soy neither in house or 3rd party as we are the 3rd party

What other advice do I have?

If you are looking to implement Amazon AWS within your company, I would suggest finding someone that already knows some AWS as it has a harder adoption curve.

I would rate it a six out of ten. 

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Director at HALL MARK GLOBAL TECHNOLOGIES
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Stable environment on a mature cloud platform
Pros and Cons
  • "Newly introduced features advance capabilities."
  • "A scalable and secure product"
  • "An integrated platform would make it easier for administrators to monitor and manage."

What is most valuable?

The scalability and security of Amazon AWS are the most valuable features.

What needs improvement?

There are multiple operational and administrative services on AWS, I am expecting to see an integrated single platform of all the services so that it will be easier for the administrators to monitor and manage.

For how long have I used the solution?

We are resellers of the production services of AWS. I have been working with Amazon AWS for almost 8 years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The AWS products are stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The environment is stable. Every time a new feature is introduced, it advances the capabilities. Once the product is deployed, you can scale up easily.

How are customer service and support?

Technical support has been very good.

How was the initial setup?

The initial set up of AWS is easy and not complex.

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

The pricing is reasonable and comparable to similar services when run on-premise.

What other advice do I have?

All the services and features provided by AWS are good. They are always improving their features.

I recommend implementing the products on Amazon Web Services. It is a stable environment and mature cloud platform. I would rate the product an 8 out of 10.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:
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December 2024
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