Amazon AWS Reviews

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 are primarily using the solution for evaluation purposes.

The functionality and the UI are both very straightforward.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The stability is good.

Technical support is quick to assist.

The pricing could be better. It's a bit expensive. 

The availability could be better.

I've been using the solution for about two years.

I haven't had any issues that would bring stability into question. there are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

I can't speak to the scaling. It's not something I've attempted. I just use it myself.

I can't say that there are plans to increase usage right now. 

Technical support has been great. They are helpful and responsive. They are very fast.

This is my first cloud product. I did not use something previously.

The initial implementation process is not difficult or complex. It's straightforward. It's basically having the computing power, the storage, S3, and the database.

The implementation was handled in-house. We did not use an external integrator, reseller, or consultant.

It's a costly product.

We pay a monthly licensing fee. It's below $100 a month.

I haven't done any evaluations or comparisons with other products.

We are customers.

We are using the latest version of the solution.

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

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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)

The most valuable feature of AWS is that you can scale it up and down as you need. The environment is a rich playground, and if you tried to do the same things on-premises that you do on AWS, it would be a lot more challenging to execute. You can open up a virtual machine on AWS, run some experiments, and be done with it. It's much easier than buying new servers, provisioning them, etc. 

Most of the companies that I've worked for deal with AWS. 

I don't know how many servers they say they have, but AWS is a highly reliable platform. I'm sure they've had outages because it's all over the news when they do, but it's stable overall.

Cloud solutions like AWS are supposed to have near-infinite scalable. That's the point. You can just keep going and make them as big or small as you need. 

AWS is like all the other cloud providers. They're all like vacuum salesmen, where they come in, and they say, "Do you want to buy this hose or this vacuum?" And you're like, "Yeah, it's not that expensive. It's a hose." And then they say, "How about these extra bags?" And you're like, "Okay. I'll buy the bags. It's not that much." Then, at the end of the day, you've bought an entire vacuum store's worth of stuff. You don't know upfront what it will cost, but they have cost calculators and other things like that.

You'll probably experience some sticker shock with AWS. You attempt to understand the cost, but you don't realize what you're paying until you get your first bill. I don't know if Amazon does that on purpose, but costs can get out of control quickly if you don't have someone who specializes in AWS cost management.

I don't even know how many microservices they have now. It seems like hundreds, so what do you do. What would you tell them to do with Aurora compared to their other stuff? There's just so much there that it's tough to get a comprehensive understanding of what you're getting into with AWS. And that's just the nature of AWS. It's a giant ecosystem. Azure is the same. I'm not familiar with GCP, but I'm sure it's the same. They do their best to make it as clean as possible from a sales perspective, but the AWS sticker shock is real.

I'm not sure about the exact costs. When I used to do stuff with Commvault and stuff, I knew the ingress and egress fees and the data cost for storage on AWS, but that was a long time ago.

I guess I would rate Amazon AWS eight out of 10. AWS works as advertised, but they're expensive if you don't know what you're doing. I'm not sure if I can knock them for not being transparent about pricing. Cloud costs are challenging. There's an entire industry popping up for managing cloud costs with consultants who can tell you how to get the most out of your AWS allocation. 

I don't have a lot of advice. If you're planning to implement a cloud solution, just pick one. I mean, if you're a Microsoft shop, it probably makes more sense to go Azure. If you're not, then I would recommend AWS. It depends on what you're looking to get out of it. 

There are references, architectures, case studies, and a million other things that would off better advice on whether to go with AWS or not. But if you're looking to go to the cloud, AWS is as good as everybody else. AWS is probably better than Azure and GCP, but that's a tricky thing to pin down. It depends on what your goals and requirements are. My best advice is to evaluate your goals before making a decision.

I hope that people take what I say about AWS with a massive grain of salt because it's like asking an ant about an elephant. What's an ant going to know about an elephant? It's just too big for any one person to know.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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

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.

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

The AWS products are stable.

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.

Technical support has been very good.

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

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

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.

On-premises

We primarily use the solution to host our control panel for our IoT devices.

The solution has very good documentation.

The initial setup is simple and straightforward.

The solution is scalable.

The stability has been good.

We have found the technical support to be helpful and responsive. 

I cannot recall feeling there were any features missing.

There is a bit of a learning curve. That said, it's likely no different than learning any other cloud.

The pricing could be a bit lower, even though its costs are in the middle of the road.

I've used the solution for about half a year. It hasn't been 12 months yet.

The stability is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's quite reliable. 

I would imagine the scaling is very good. It's advertised as quite scalable and everything points to that being the case. However, I have not personally attempted to scale. We're still building the application, and therefore we aren't at the point of scaling.

We have three people using the solution currently.

Technical support is very helpful and responsive. They have been good so far. We have no complaints and are quite satisfied with the support we receive.

We did not use a different solution. We chose Amazon due to its good documentation and middle-of-the-road costs.

While I wasn't a part of the initial implementation, it's my understanding that the process is very simple and straightforward. It's not an overly complex process. 

The cost is moderate. It's not overly expensive.

We are just customers and end-users. We don't have a business relationship with Amazon.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. 

I'd recommend the solution. It's a good choice and one we stand behind.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We are very satisfied with the product so far. Likely, if the price was lower, we would rate it higher.

Public Cloud

We are hosting some education servers and web servers.

We have used Amazon AWS for a very large scale of server deployment. Also, we have run some tests using resources from AWS EC2. We don't have to go out investing for that resource, we just use them for a short period of time and we pay only for that usage. It has helped us scale quickly, and save a lot of money instead of buying those services.

The features with Amazon AWS that I have found most valuable are its flexibility and high availability. These are the most important and attractive points for me.

In terms of what could be improved, I also use Google Cloud GCP and AWS cannot directly use the Azure EC2 consult. They could add that feature. Direct connection to the EC2 console server would be very useful.

I am certified on AWS from the cloud provider side. 

I use the RDS, Relational Database Solution, and the EC2 technology on AWS.

I have been using it for more than four years.

Amazon AWS is quite stable. I have read a lot of reports from third parties, and they also have a robust testing methodology. And from my own experience, I can say that it's really, really very stable.

In terms of scalability, the sky is the limit. There is no limit for scalability. If you have money to spend, you get whatever resource you want.

We had some issues and we had pretty good support. They even created a special attach for us to solve our problem and they responded very quickly. If you buy the additional support, the support is really good.

The initial setup is easier now. Four years ago it was harder, but nowadays it is a lot easier, because a lot of boiler plate set ups are done for you. So you can just start using it right away, even if you are not experienced. 

Four years ago, it was not like this, but it's better now.

In terms of price, it is more expensive than other cloud providers, but it is worth it. It is not that much more, so you can go with it. It's not too bad. It's more expensive than the others, but it's bearable.

On a scale of one to ten I would rate Amazon AWS a nine.

To bring that up a bit, as I mentioned, I would like to have a direct connection to the EC2 server console. That's why I'm just not giving a 10.

For anyone interested in using Amazon AWS, I would advise them to read the online documentation. It's very clear and shows you step by step how to use the system. If you need more advanced features, you can find a lot of resources on the internet and on their website. So if you want to use a public cloud, I strongly advise using AWS.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)