All of our clients look to migrate their workloads to the cloud and we propose the use of AWS depending on the technology of the client or the workload they want to migrate. Our primary use cases are workloadmigrations, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), sometimes platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS). We use different AWS services, Elastic cloud compute, Web application firewall, AWS firewall, LAMBDA, CloudTrail, and others.
IT Solutions Architect at Canvia
Control Tower enables us to organize the different accounts our clients have
Pros and Cons
- "It's a very flexible and customizable service"
- "Monthly costs can be high if you don't maintain your usage"
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
AWS has a lot of services that are very good. One of the services I use is AWS Transit Gateway. This service allows me to communicate between different networks in different accounts. It's good for network communication. The other service I use a lot of is "Control Tower", it's a service used to organize the different accounts our clients have.
What needs improvement?
With regards to improving the service, I don't see any room for improvement at this time. I love the technology, it is a very good public cloud offering with very good services. Until now, there are no services that I don't like.
One other aspect, it would be good to see the basic service level improved with regards to response time. They don't offer 24-hour support.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Amazon AWS for around two years.
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?
AWS is very stable. They have an SLA of 99.99%.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
AWS is very scalable.
How are customer service and support?
My experience with AWS support is very good. There are four types of support: basic, free, business and premium. It depends on the level of support you have which determines how quickly they can respond about an incident, ticket or request you have.
How was the initial setup?
It's very easy to set up services in AWS. Depending on the solution you need to deploy it can be very quick. A virtual machine can be deployed in 5 minutes.
What about the implementation team?
Our company is a partner with Amazon, we implement in-house.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
What is hard with the public cloud service like AWS, is ensuring you maintain a good budget. Plan the monthly consumption properly. If you don't have the expertise in the cloud, your monthly cost can go very high. It's also very easy to set up services in AWS.
I would also suggest companies look for a good partner that has the necessary experience to deploy the services when moving to the cloud. It's very simple, but you need to design a very good architecture for cost optimization and performance.
What other advice do I have?
The solution is good for integration. It's very flexible and customizable with other services, public, cloud and on-premise.
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:
Lead architect at Tech Mahindra Limited
Stable, scalable, and offers many services
Pros and Cons
- "Amazon AWS is easy to use and in the past two years, I've never had any issues with scalability or stability."
- "This solution could be improved by a better licensing model, especially for third-party software. Amazon AWS could also potentially be improved by more free storage, but I think that it's okay when compared to competitors' products."
What is our primary use case?
This solution has many use cases. Amazon AWS offers a lot of services, all of which are useful. How useful this solution will be for you depends on how it fits your business.
What is most valuable?
Amazon AWS is easy to use and in the past two years, I've never had any issues with scalability or stability.
What needs improvement?
This solution could be improved by a better licensing model, especially for third-party software. Amazon AWS could also potentially be improved by more free storage, but I think that it's okay when compared to competitors' products.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Amazon AWS for more than two or three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
This solution is stable. I haven't had any problems with stability in the past two years.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
This solution is cloud-based, so it's scalable. It is elastic, so as soon as you want to increase storage, you do so without any issues. There are about four thousand to five thousand people using AWS in my organization.
How are customer service and support?
I have contacted Amazon's technical support and it was quite an easy process. You will have a solution within 24 hours.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I didn't use another fast cloud solution before Amazon AWS.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is easy and you don't really need to install anything. If you understand cloud solutions, you can easily do it yourself.
What about the implementation team?
I implemented myself, with an in-house team.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
We need to pay for everything. If someone is a personal user, they get one year free. But if you are using this as a professional or enterprise solution, then your company has to pay. The license pricing is comparable to that of competitors'.
What other advice do I have?
I rate Amazon AWS a nine out of ten, primarily because I have a background in Java. Someone else with more experience in Microsoft technologies would probably prefer Azure. I recommend AWS to anyone considering implementing it because it's easy to use.
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.
Buyer's Guide
Amazon AWS
November 2024
Learn what your peers think about Amazon AWS. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: November 2024.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Senior Cloud Consultant at GBM
IaaS with compute, storage, and networking, that is reliable and highly scalable
Pros and Cons
- "It has many choices of computer options, storage options, and even database options."
- "The web console of AWS is not so user-friendly."
What is our primary use case?
It's a powerful infrastructure as a service solution, IaaS. It offers compute resources, storage, networking, and databases to quickly create your cloud infrastructure.
What is most valuable?
Apart from the infrastructure as a service, the AWS Lambda, which functions as the service FaaS, is really powerful.
It's a powerful way of quickly assembling or developing applications, which can be scaled immensely and also at a fraction of the cost because you are charged per the execution time of each function. If you are writing a small function as an AWS Lambda function, then you are paying only for those milliseconds for the time at which it runs.
It's a very cost-efficient way of running applications in the cloud rather than running an EC2-compute instance, which is charged by the hour or by the minute. You typically have to keep the EC2 instance updating all of the time. Whereas in functions, a function is invoked only when a user is calling it. Or, the front-end is calling the backend function. Lambda is very powerful and it is also typically used as a mobile backend. Essentially, it's a very strong API-based backend for mobile solutions.
It has many choices of computer options, storage options, and even database options.
It's flexible, you can run any kind of workload on the infrastructure.
What needs improvement?
One feature I would like to see is to have a better or a more user-friendly web console.
The web console of AWS is not so user-friendly. They can make it more user-friendly, which will be good for administrators or users of AWS.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Amazon AWS for five years.
We are using the latest version.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It's very stable. It is highly reliable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is highly scalable. It's a very powerful platform.
In my previous organization, there were 12 people using AWS.
How are customer service and technical support?
We have used technical support to an extent, and it's fine. We are satisfied with technical support.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I have used Azure Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and I have a bit of experience with Google Cloud as well.
How was the initial setup?
You have to create an EC2 instance, which is the compute. We have to create that to get the compute platform, but you have to install your application. You have to patch the operating system and you have to upgrade your operating system.
The operating system and upwards is the customer's responsibility in an EC2 instance.
It's a straightforward installation because it's your application and your operating system just like you are on-premises, but you will do it on the cloud through a browser or through a CLI, a command-line tool.
The deployment timeline depends on how complex your application is. Because you are getting the platform from AWS as a computing platform, you have to install your application. It depends on the complexity of your application, so it varies.
Depending on how much you are using it, determines the maintenance. Typically, you will need different roles, you will need administrators who operate this environment, and if you are also developing applications, you would need developers.
What about the implementation team?
The installation and deployment can be done by yourself.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
You are not paying a licensing fee, you pay for consumption. You pay for your consumption and it' is typically paid on a monthly basis.
It's a pay-as-you-go model.
Some services are expensive, but the basic infrastructure services are a platform that is reasonably priced.
What other advice do I have?
We plan to continue using this solution, and I would definitely recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it.
I would rate Amazon AWS an eight out of ten.
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.
System Administrator and DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Plenty of services, simple to understand, with significant support
Pros and Cons
- "Some of the valuable features I have found to be the virtual server is easy to understand, a secure environment, and AWS has a fast community for finding solutions to problems you might be facing."
What is our primary use case?
There are different services, approximately 150 of them, this solution can provide. There are a few services I most commonly use. I am using it for the virtual servers, Lightsail which are lightweight virtual servers, and a simple storage service which is called S3.
What is most valuable?
Some of the valuable features I have found to be the virtual server is easy to understand, a secure environment, and AWS has a fast community for finding solutions to problems you might be facing.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the solution for three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We have approximately 15 users using the solution in my organization.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability of the solution all depends on the services that you are using. It is very easy to scale in the cloud if you want to launch multiple servers and if you want to vertically or horizontally scale up the servers. It can support many environments such as Windows and Linux.
How are customer service and technical support?
The support is fast at responding and resolving issues.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I have used Microsoft Azure and DigitalOcean previously.
How was the initial setup?
The solution is an on-demand service. There is a monthly billing requirement which is for the virtual machines we currently use.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The solution is expensive compared to other providers because you need many of the services and it can add up fast.
What other advice do I have?
I recommend this solution to others and I plan to use the solution in the future.
I rate Amazon AWS a ten out of ten.
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.
Lead Architect - Expert Enterprise Data Solutions at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Good storage and API gateway but needs a metadata framework
Pros and Cons
- "The storage on offer is excellent."
- "Their metadata management in AWS needs improvement."
What is our primary use case?
We are primarily using the solution as real-time streaming to our data-lake. We also have microservices publishing to APIs. It's a customer 360 application.
We also used the product for migration from on-prem Hadoop to AWS EMR.
How has it helped my organization?
We used to spend about $57,000 on-perm with another solution. Then we lifted and shifted to AWS. It came down in cost to about $33,000 while maintaining the same inner software with Apache Kafka. However, we then got into ECS Fargate, and that brought costs down further to about $22,000. When we removed ECS, we moved into a serverless Lambda for 45 million, and our billing is now $8000 per month. It's an amazing amount of savings.
What is most valuable?
The solution's API Gateway is very good.
The storage on offer is excellent.
Recently they improved a lot in the analytics that they have on the backend.
It's great that the product is completely serverless.
The implementation for end-to-end, for Lambda serverless implementation, is excellent. I do run about 16 million messages per day with their Lambdas, for my API microservices.
The initial setup is not difficult.
What needs improvement?
We get a lot of exception errors, and we're working with AWS to figure out how to fix that. when we lift and shift . We get a lot of alerts.
As our serverless Lambda is maintained by AWS, in a certain aspect, we need to gain some more visibility into what is going on when problem happens with AWS serverless
Their metadata management in AWS needs improvement. They need a centralized metadata management tool, where it can be integrated with outside metadata tools with the API. We really need a central metadata framework.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using the solution for four years. It's been a while at this point.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability of the solution is very good. there are no bugs or glitches. it doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. That said, initially, we did have a few problems, however, everything has ironed out. It's great now.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scalability-wise, the product is very good. The Lambdas and the serverless architecture are very good on AWS. If a company needs to expand, it can do so with ease.
We have a lot of APIs, and we'll run them on my customer 360. There are six departments that use the product. We have about 1,000 users currently.
How are customer service and technical support?
We've dealt with technical support in the past and have not been satisfied for the most part. Azure's technical support is much better. AWS often can't help us resolve our issues. But they brought some good consultants basing on our request and helped us . The account Manager always there when he took over this account .
i recommend IAAS AWS , for IPAAS ( integration as platform service) and Hybrid cloud Azure
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We've also planed for Azure. We've found Azure to be much more helpful when dealing with issues than AWS has been. I prefer them over AWS in support , application development and integration as platform. But AWS has great products like S3 , API gateway , transit gateways , route 53 . AWS has more OS options than AZURE and database offerings. their EMR is good with spark and python but not well supported for Scala and HBase. AWS serverless offerings are very good with out any major problems which includes ECS with fargate and EKS . But we got a good support from account manager
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is not complex. When we lifted and shifted faced lot of problems on EMR. Moved to ECS, as well as serverless Lambda, it's was that difficult then. That said, we had to think about how we run our Lambdas, and what problems we are facing or might face.
We're also facing a few problems due to the fact that we use encryption, HCM. When we initially started loading this data, batch data, a lot of Lambdas came, and our limit in HCM is only about 5,000 a minute, however, it quickly jumped up to 20,000 which made it so that we could not load, and errors came up. We had to turn to AWS to get assistance. We just ask them if we can have space over a few days for 20,000 and then they scale it back to 3,000. they helped us
In terms of the implementation strategy, ours took about eight months. The lift and shift happened within 3 months. Then, we took another four months as we had a lot of problems with our scale-up programming due to multiple issues - for example, libraries, EMR, AWS doesn't have. We faced some problems when we had to change our code according to AWS, or we have to bring in those libraries on our own. So that's where it took time, maybe four months.
For ECS, it took about 30 days to move everything we needed to.
We don't have a lot of staff to maintain the product. We have about eight people who are capable of doing so. For example, we have someone on infrastructure, who is an architect and we have an enterprise architecture team. I have four developers, two for API and two for Lambda, and one is a systems admin.
What about the implementation team?
Initial setup environment helped by AWS free . We were able to handle every aspect of the implementation in-house. We didn't need any consultants or integrators. We used our systems manager so that all of our deployments - including environments and keys - can be stored on our SSM. A lot was automated as well.
What was our ROI?
excellent in covid -19 situation .
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
We saw a lot of cost savings when we switched over to AWS. It can really save a company a lot of money.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Azure and AWS
What other advice do I have?
I'm a user and implementer.
The solution is on the cloud; it's always the latest version. It's constantly being updated, and we're always using the latest version.
We use both public and hybrid clouds as deployment models.
I'd rate the solution at a seven 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.
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.
Sr. Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
CloudWatch provides many plugins to manage various types of logs centrally.
What is most valuable?
Auto Scaling and CloudWatch Logs are the most valuable features. With just a few criteria to scale in/out of, you can save the life and time for DevOps.
The CloudWatch Logs feature provides many plugins, so that we are able to manage various types of logs centrally.
How has it helped my organization?
In the era, we used private clouds as network virtualization must be controlled by the IT division, server rooms were in the remote branches and DevOps were distributed in various areas. Now, we can use the same API and the same workflow without considering to centralize the logs.
What needs improvement?
IaaS is sometimes way too complicated to complete one task.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used this solution for around eight months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
So far, the VPC is sometimes not that reliable. Therefore, we have to set up a redundant VPC to make sure the connection is always available.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We do not have any scalability issues until now.
How are customer service and technical support?
I have never used technical support.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Previously, we surveyed OpenStack. However, due to the time, budget and manpower limitations, building a private cloud is not practical in our case.
How was the initial setup?
Managing IaaS was very difficult in the beginning, i.e., tons of jargon to get up and I struggled for months.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Try the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). It is yet another good choice because sometimes, what you need is just a platform and not to build a platform from the infrastructure.
What other advice do I have?
When your division grows to a certain scale and you really need DevOps, then you could move either to a private/public cloud. Otherwise, it is a waste of time and money.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Program and Project Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
As with all public clouds, there is still a dilemma with security, but provides a rich set of services for IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.
AWS is a good platform for non-MySQL, MySQL, and Hadoop databases, but it’s not as good for RDBMS ones like MS SQL. It still has many missing features -- like replication, backup policy, and the ability to store/attach databases from a local drive -- but it has many good features for big data.
Its new AppStream service will pre-process graphics, including 3D renderings, and blast the results to mobile clients. Its Kinesis service for streaming data sets the stage for building big data apps on AWS, the basic architecture for the internet of things. As for its Hadoop capabilities, AWS launched its Elastic MapReduce (EMR) a long time back. It is the best cloud services provider for open source software for databases, operating systems hosting apps, and many other customized applications.
As discussed with many tech professionals, there is still a dilemma with security like there was a decade ago when online e-commerce business started and people weren’t prepared to share their credit card and bank details. Now, as online shopping is common, I am expecting the same trend will grow for public cloud very soon. AWS security is very good and they are following all the required security regulations as much other public cloud providers are doing, as they know any security breach could impact their entire business.
Pricing is another key concern when private cloud is used for big business and multiple growth on data. The price is a big debate and requires lot of analysis, as it is a question for big organizations. But no doubt, AWS is quite good for a small setup as it’s very cost effective and provides an eco-setup.
AWS is quite for good cloud services such as IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. It provides a rich set of services and integrated monitoring tools alongside a competitive pricing model. AWS offers a full range of computer and storage offerings, including on-demand instances and specialized services such as Amazon EMR, and Cluster GPU instances. Amazon Cloud Trail and Amazon CloudWatch services are very good monitoring and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a good administration and security feature for administrators to use.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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