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Kublai Gomez - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at Userlytics Corporation
Real User
Top 10
A solution with a great uptime that needs to improve its pricing models
Pros and Cons
  • "The most valuable feature of the solution is that they offer everything around in just one platform."
  • "Price is an area with a shortcoming in the solution that has a scope for improvement"

What is our primary use case?

The use cases of the solution depend on your project. The project I am working on right now is using Amazon Rekognition heavily, along with S3 and EC2. There are a lot of instances involving EC2. The last one involved using a text-to-speech, of which I don't remember the name, but that was the project's main goal. The use cases depend on the circumstance of your project, so it is not the same for all.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature of the solution is that they offer everything around in just one platform. They have almost everything. For example, a couple of weeks ago, I was trying to build a server with RabbitMQ for some kind of real-time communication in an environment where I was working. Amazon already has a service named Amazon MQ, because of which you don't need to configure your server by yourself since you already have it integrated into the ecosystem. It's easy to ensure that the server is there for your system without any issues and allows you to run it in seconds instead of three or four days.

What needs improvement?

Price is an area with a shortcoming in the solution that has a scope for improvement. Amazon can improve in some areas related to its pricing. Amazon selected the pricing plans, and I had to choose one. In general, it is an expensive tool.

It is cheap when you are starting with the tool since they have this free tier. However, that is not the reality when you really start working with Amazon since you will end up paying a lot at the end of every month.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Amazon AWS with different clients for six to seven years. I am a customer of the solution.

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Amazon AWS
January 2025
Learn what your peers think about Amazon AWS. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2025.
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I believe that it's a stable product. I never had any issues with Amazon. I'm trying to remember, but I think that I have never faced any stability issues. It was working twenty-four hours and seven days a week all the time.

How are customer service and support?

I have contacted Amazon's customer support. It was just a couple of calls when I was working in Iceland on a project, and the servers were not reachable. There was some kind of issue at the country level, not an issue of Amazon specifically. There was some issue with the solution in Iceland.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is a thing that you need to learn. The setup part is not easy at all. Usually, in some companies, you have a person that works only with Amazon. You have one profile in your company just to work with the infrastructure services inside Amazon. You need a kind of specialized profile for that work.

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

The solution's pricing depends on your traffic since they charge you based on the traffic, not the servers. The price can go into many, many thousands depending on the traffic.

The price also depends on your services since, if you are using Amazon Rekognition or S3 with a low tier price.

What other advice do I have?

Well, for a small company, normally, my advice would be that Amazon AWS is not the best option. If you are trying to use Amazon for the first time, it means you need a big project on your hands, and you already have an MVP running. If you are going to use Amazon for the first time, then you already know what you are going to deal with, so such people don't need my advice in that case.

The price is my concern, so I am searching for some other options to leave Amazon. It is not for quality-related reasons.

I rate the overall solution a seven out of ten.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Managing Director at Erste Group
Real User
Good price, easy to set up and migrate, but could use some more integration
Pros and Cons
  • "Setting up AWS was pretty easy. It was straightforward to set up, and it took us a year to develop and migrate our mobile banking solution to the AWS cloud. Our migration experience was quite positive."
  • "In terms of additional features we'd like to see, the one thing that comes to mind is better integration with Oracle. We have a lot of Oracle databases, and there is no other option to either migrate to PaaS, stay on-prem, or use Oracle Private Cloud."

What is most valuable?

I'm not the developer, so I cannot judge the services provided by AWS, but we run our mobile banking application on AWS. Database-wise, it's heavily based on Elasticsearch, so this is probably one of the main features that we find most valuable. Aside from that, I'm not familiar with which AWS services we are using.

What needs improvement?

It's too early to say what needs to be improved, as we went live only at the beginning of this year. We started last year and went live at the beginning of this year, so it's still a work in progress. In terms of additional features we'd like to see, the one thing that comes to mind is better integration with Oracle. We have a lot of Oracle databases, and there is no other option to either migrate to PaaS, stay on-prem, or use Oracle Private Cloud. So better integration with Oracle is something we are looking into. It's the same story with AWS or Azure. 

For how long have I used the solution?

We introduced AWS in production last year, so it's a relatively new development.

How was the initial setup?

Setting up AWS was pretty easy. It was straightforward to set up, and it took us a year to develop and migrate our mobile banking solution to the AWS cloud. Our migration experience was quite positive.

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

The pricing of AWS was attractive for us, so that's something that's okay at least for this transaction-based system. However, we still have some concerns about more data-driven applications or those that involve a lot of heavy uploading and downloading. So our whole data warehouse is still something that would not go into the cloud because of the pricing model. So if you stayed pretty much in the cloud, that's fine.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Amazon AWS seven out of 10. We're really satisfied.

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
Amazon AWS
January 2025
Learn what your peers think about Amazon AWS. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2025.
831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Manager Project Management at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Feature-rich, flexible, simple to install, and easy to use
Pros and Cons
  • "It scales well and is flexible."
  • "As a result of the competency, I believe that most people are now leaning toward Azure rather than AWS."

What is our primary use case?

We use Amazon AWS for provisioning and the majority of our deployments.

We support and provide services for our clients who lean towards using AWS.

What is most valuable?

Amazon AWS is easy to use.

It scales well and is flexible.

When compared to Google Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure, it has almost all of the features.

What needs improvement?

As a result of the competency, I believe that most people are now leaning toward Azure rather than AWS. That is also according to Gartner's forecast, more people are turning to Microsoft Azure.

The price could be better.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using Amazon AWS for more than three years.

We are always using the latest version.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Amazon AWS is a stable solution.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It is a scalable product.

When the number of users increases, the bandwidth automatically increases, and when the number of users decreases, the bandwidth decreases.

We have a large organization with over 3,500 users, and more than 60 customers.

Our organization has an AWS center of excellence that increases our usage.

How are customer service and support?

I personally have not contacted technical support. 

We contact our own center of excellence team, who would then contact the AWS support team for any information we required. That is the order in which we must proceed. It's the hierarchy that we must adhere to.

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

I am also, familiar with Splunk.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is straightforward.

The installation is done through the AWS Cloud and is so simple that it only took me 15 minutes to create instances, possibly even less than 10 minutes.

We have 200 engineers who are responsible for both the development tasks and the maintenance.

What about the implementation team?

I was able to complete the installation myself.

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

When compared to GCP, Google, or Azure, the price could be lower.

As a company and a platinum sponsor, we know exactly where management will make a decision on getting the best price for us.

A monthly fee is a good option for a startup company or an individual, and it is paid yearly for larger organizations.

What other advice do I have?

I would recommend this solution to others because I am not familiar with Azure and only have experience with AWS.

We don't have any issues with this product. I would rate Amazon AWS a ten out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
it_user1338108 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Architect at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Reseller
Highly scalable, highly stable, and fast support
Pros and Cons
  • "We are mostly using EC2 compute and other resources. Most of our managed services are in AWS, which some of our clients prefer."
  • "User personalization and robotic process automation services need to be mature enough. More APIs are required for robotic process automation services. Azure is more mature in terms of user personalization and robotic process automation services. The document processing can also be better. Whenever we want to do any kind of document management, I try to do OCR, ICR, etc. The functionality in AWS has to be more like that."

What is our primary use case?

Most of our managed services are in Amazon Web Services. We also use Kubernetes clusters for some of the cases. 

We are basically on the cloud, and most of our clients prefer AWS as the cloud provider. Most of the solutions have been on-premises, which basically involves migration to AWS. We also started using a hybrid model because some of the clients prefer a hybrid cloud kind of approach, where they have an on-premises model and something on the cloud so that they can just connect their data centers to the public cloud. 

What is most valuable?

We are mostly using EC2 compute and other resources. Most of our managed services are in AWS, which some of our clients prefer.

What needs improvement?

User personalization and robotic process automation services need to be mature enough. More APIs are required for robotic process automation services. Azure is more mature in terms of user personalization and robotic process automation services. 

The document processing can also be better. Whenever we want to do any kind of document management, I try to do OCR, ICR, etc. The functionality in AWS has to be more like that.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Amazon AWS for almost two and a half years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is a stable product. We do not have any issues with its stability. Most of the customers come for 99% to 99.95% availability. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

AWS has a very highly scalable model. Because the availability requirements are high, we typically go for additional redundancy. It is easily possible to support different operating models in AWS.

How are customer service and technical support?

Their technical support is very good and fast. Whenever you need something to be fixed, they are able to do it completely.

How was the initial setup?

It is comparatively very easy. We have our own R&D environment where we do our work. When we want to actually do something for the client, we just move the work that we have done in our R&D environment into the client's cloud. It is very easy to use all the services.

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

Its price is kind of okay. When we do a migration from on-premises to the cloud, we typically use the lift-and-shift model. Based on the studies that we have done, cost savings are definitely there when we moved from on-premises to the cloud.

What other advice do I have?

I feel that you shouldn't basically stick with any particular cloud provider. If you really want to take the benefits of a multi-cloud environment, you should not build your applications focused on any particular cloud provider. You should build something that is generic, and whenever required, you should be able to switch to any kind of cloud provider. People tend to actually focus on one particular cloud provider, and they start building their applications to cater to that provider. You shouldn't do that. You should reap the benefits of all cloud providers. This is what we also say to our clients.

I would rate Amazon AWS an eight out of ten. It is really good as compared to the other cloud providers such as Google Cloud.

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: Reseller
PeerSpot user
Director of Platform and Information Security at Brace Software
Real User
Perfect for startups and easy to implement but offers a confusing amount of tools
Pros and Cons
  • "The solution offers a low footprint. We don't have to come up with a data center ourselves. We basically don't have to own any hardware. We just rent a slice of their platform and we have everything we need."
  • "They should really consolidate and make things simpler rather than offer you hundreds of random options. The way everything is arranged really forces users to figure out everything on their own and then, on top of that, to calculate the total costs. There's an infinite number of combinations even just with cost calculations. It's just too much."

What is our primary use case?

We're building an application and host on Amazon. We are a startup company, so it's in a very early development stage. We're trying to build a particular application for multiple customers. The idea is if you have a VPC for each customer you can segregate each client with their own isolated environment. That's what we're building. We're going to build one application that can be personalized for each client. 

How has it helped my organization?

The fact that we as a startup don't have to invest in expensive hardware and a place to house it is very helpful for our small business. It saves us money in the long run in overhead costs and allows us to stay streamlined. There's no heavy investment on the outset and we're really just renting the exact amount of what we need.

What is most valuable?

AWS is a cloud platform. There are hundreds of tools within it. The cloud handles the updates so we never have to worry about looking for the latest version of the solution.

The solution offers a low footprint. We don't have to come up with a data center ourselves. We basically don't have to own any hardware. We just rent a slice of their platform and we have everything we need.

What needs improvement?

The biggest area for improvement is the fact that there are a vast amount of tools. The best way to describe it is this: you have lots of Lego pieces, hundreds of Lego pieces, but they all do something specific. However, it's very difficult to understand the purpose of these tools, how are they fit into our environment, our design ideas, etc. To assemble all of these tools, to make them fit into the architectural vision of the company, is very difficult. This is especially true for a startup that doesn't have unlimited resources for research and study. We cannot comprehend the vast amount of information that Amazon produces.

The pricing is very confusing.  

They should really consolidate and make things simpler rather than offer you hundreds of random options. The way everything is arranged really forces users to figure out everything on their own and then, on top of that, to calculate the total costs. There's an infinite number of combinations even just with cost calculations. It's too much. 

For how long have I used the solution?

While the company has been around for three years and has used the solution since its inception, I have only worked here for three months and have a total of three months of experience with the solution.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is very stable. AWS is quite reliable and we haven't had issues. There haven't been bugs, glitches, or crashes. It works well and as expected.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

AWS is extremely scalable. It's designed to be. The sky really is the limit. Users and organizations can expand as much as they like.

We're a small company right now. We're still in the startup phase. We have about 20 people at the moment. We have a dozen developers directly on it now. That said, you probably only need two people for development and maintenance.

We do plan to expand in the future.

How are customer service and technical support?

Personally I haven't used their support yet. I cannot give more info. I've only been at the company for three months and haven't faced any issues that required me to reach out to technical support.

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

We are just a startup so the company is young. The founders made the choice to use the database and they've used it since day one. 

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is both really straightforward and complex. At first, it's simple. However, as you get deeper into the solution and work in all kinds of variations or all kinds of scenarios, things get really complex. The more you have to consider the more complicated it can get. The complexities multiple quickly.

We use Terraform to provision the best infrastructure, which makes our platform really easy to manage in terms of our implementation strategy.

What about the implementation team?

We handled the implementation ourselves. We didn't need to hire on an integrator or consultant to assist us.

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

The calculating of costs is quite difficult. There are all kinds of variables to consider and it's all very unclear.

It's my understanding that our company is charged a few hundred dollars on a monthly basis.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

My understanding is that this product was used from day one. I don't think other options were considered. However, I was not at the company when AWS was implemented.

What other advice do I have?

We're a startup company. It's a very small company with only 20 people. Everything we use is cloud-based. We're simply a customer of AWS. We don't have a special relationship with the company.

I'd warn others considering using the solution that the environment is vast and complex, and a company will need a lot of tools at their disposal for research and to understand the product. If there are people within the organization who already have experience with the architecture or with similar solutions within the AWS environment, that will help make implementation successful. It's important to bring people who have previous AWS architecture experience into the organization.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. It does do everything we need it to do, however, as a small company, figuring it out is a big effort. Making it more streamlined or straightforward in the future would probably give it higher marks.

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
I help CTOs/Managed Service Providers save 7%-55% on AWS bills with AI. at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Real User
Much faster than other solutions at a super low cost
Pros and Cons
  • "Some of the introduced one-year and three-year reservations helped us reduce costs early on. With time, we learned how to minimize our at REST capacity, allowing us to scale up and scale down in near seconds."
  • "Serverless computing: This can be more cost-efficient just regarding computing resources than renting or purchasing a fixed quantity of servers, which involves periods of underutilization or nonuse."
  • "They are mainly generalists without access to the operating system. As such, they can provide container level insights,not necessarily at the application level."
  • "Somehow Amazon associated their marketplace as a place to find images of various installs (preconfigured software) and was late in the game enabling and promoting SaaS-based solutions. Thus, the AWS marketplace has near zero awareness in the mind of the prospect to find solutions to various problems plaguing them."

What is our primary use case?

In recent years, we have use AWS primarily for its serverless capabilities. It has the ability to scale up from one to 10,000 vCPUs for a few brief seconds. The vCPUs perform intensive calculations with deep learning (artificial intelligence calculations), which is not possible via traditional computing approaches.

How has it helped my organization?

AWS helped us reduce costs from CapEx to OpEx. Some of the introduced one-year and three-year reservations helped us reduce costs early on. With time, we learned how to minimize our at REST capacity, allowing us to scale up and scale down in near seconds. 

What is most valuable?

Serverless computing: This can be more cost-efficient just regarding computing resources than renting or purchasing a fixed quantity of servers, which involves periods of underutilization or nonuse. It can even be more cost-efficient than provisioning an autoscaling group, because even autoscaling groups are typically designed to have underutilization to allow time for new instances to start up.

Also, a serverless architecture means developers and operations specialists do not need to spend time setting up and tuning autoscaling policies or systems. The cloud provider is responsible for ensuring that the capacity meets the demand.

What needs improvement?

AWS Marketplace: Somehow Amazon associated their marketplace as a place to find images of various installs (preconfigured software) and was late in the game enabling and promoting SaaS-based solutions. Thus, the AWS marketplace has near zero awareness in the mind of the prospect to find solutions to various problems plaguing them. 

For how long have I used the solution?

More than five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No stability issues.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No scalability issues.

How are customer service and technical support?

They are mainly generalists without access to the operating system. As such, they can provide container level insights,not necessarily at the application level.

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

I have used AWS for the last eight years since 2010. Previously, we used various VPS, dedicated servers, and Amazon's solutions, which were crude but a promise for something beyond the traditional infrastructure options. 

How was the initial setup?

It was straightforward.

What about the implementation team?

No vendor team was necessary.

What was our ROI?

We are reducing costs year-over-year.

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

Much faster than other solutions at a super low cost.

One of the best-kept ways to reduce costs is to develop it on serverless technologies with AWS Lambda, SNS, DynamoDB, and S3. Business example: By deploying our websites on Amazon S3 instead of the traditional Apache web servers, we eliminated many of the compute costs. Our WordPress site is served by a static S3 bucket. One of the benefits of this is our sites are superfast, especially with CloudFront. CloudFront makes the S3 hosted sites available across the world in milliseconds, reducing network hops and costs similar to that of Akamai. 

Just imagine the headaches associated with Apache web servers, MySQL databases, and Nginx reverse proxies? 

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: AWS marketplace vendor.
PeerSpot user
Kublai Gomez - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at Userlytics Corporation
Real User
Top 10
The product has an all-encompassing ecosystem, but the pricing should be improved
Pros and Cons
  • "The ecosystem offered by the product has almost everything."
  • "The initial setup is not easy at all."

What is our primary use case?

The use cases depend on the projects. The project that I am currently working on uses Rekognition heavily. It also uses S3 and EC2. My previous project was using it for the text-to-speech feature.

What is most valuable?

The ecosystem offered by the product has almost everything. A couple of weeks ago, I was trying to build a server with RabbitMQ for real-time communication in an environment. Amazon already has a service called Amazon MQ. We don’t need to configure the server ourselves because we already have one integrated into the ecosystem. It’s easy to install the server in our system. We can run it in ten minutes instead of waiting three to four days.

What needs improvement?

The initial setup is not easy at all.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using the solution for six to seven years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is stable. I never had any issues with Amazon. It works all the time, 24/7.

How are customer service and support?

I have contacted support. It was just a couple of calls. We weren’t able to reach the server. There was some issue at the country level in Iceland. The problem was not with Amazon specifically.

How was the initial setup?

We will have to learn to setup the tool. Someone with no experience would not be able to do it. In some companies, there is a person that works only with Amazon. The person will be profiling the company to work with the service center infrastructure inside Amazon.

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

The solution should improve the pricing. The area that I work for is expensive. The product is cheap when we start using it. It provides AWS Free Tier. However, it is not the same when you work continuously with Amazon. We end up paying a lot at the end of every month. 

The pricing depends on the traffic because they charge by the traffic. They do not charge us based on servers. The price also depends on the services we use. It would be different if we used S3.

What other advice do I have?

The product is not the best option for a small company. If someone is trying to use Amazon for the first time and already has an NPP running, they can use it. If someone has used Amazon, they would already know what they are going to deal with. The cost is a concern for me. Some people are trying to leave Amazon and are searching for other options. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Head of Implementation and Security at a financial services firm with 1-10 employees
Real User
It makes deployment and management of infrastructure easier
Pros and Cons
  • "AWS's containerization is the most useful feature for us."
  • "I'd like to see AWS implement consolidated billing for businesses operating under one group. We want to consolidate the functionalities but keep the billing separate. That is a challenge we've faced, and I feel it's something they can improve on. For example, maybe you have three businesses that are operating under one group, and you want each entity to have a separate bill for the respective workload that they're using."

What is our primary use case?

AWS makes deployment and management of infrastructure easier. We are using so many features, including Lambda, Elastic Beanstalk, Elastic Container Service, EC2 instances, and Landing Zone. We rely heavily on AWS, and we're constantly taking advantage of new features as they come out to see how they can add value to the business. 

What is most valuable?

AWS's containerization is the most useful feature for us. 

What needs improvement?

I'd like to see AWS implement consolidated billing for businesses operating under one group. We want to consolidate the functionalities but keep the billing separate. That is a challenge we've faced, and I feel it's something they can improve on. For example, maybe you have three businesses that are operating under one group, and you want each entity to have a separate bill for the respective workload that they're using. But in terms of technical expertise, you want to consolidate the technical support and function of the three accounts. That's an area where AWS is struggling.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using Amazon AWS for about four or five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

AWS is stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

AWS is scalable. We're serving close to 7,000 or 8,000 end-users with it.

How are customer service and support?

AWS support is good.

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

AWS is pay as you go.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We reviewed the main three cloud providers: GCP, Azure, and AWS.

What other advice do I have?

I rate AWS 9.5 out of 10. I would recommend it. 

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: January 2025
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Amazon AWS Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.