Amazon AWS Reviews

My primary use case is to set up an end-to-end application to deliver a business case involving data ingestion, processing, transformation, and checking, followed by outputs to other functions and processes in AWS and also to external systems.

We are using Step Functions as a core automation tool and it offers great power through its simplicity. It is quite easy to use, although there is a learning curve when using the Step Function scripts. Once mastered, after a week or so, the flows can be built quickly and effectively, allowing us to link a custom business process to multiple other AWS service automatically. 

That done, most business cases can be delivered easily and quickly, all in a serverless and cost-effective way. 

AWS has improved my organization by:

- saving us time, cost, and difficulty by allowing us to use serverless services

- enabling us to assemble complex applications with the minimum of boilerplate and plumbing

- allowing us to pay-as-we-go, so we can rapidly prototype, test, and then deploy to a production application setup

We can run advanced demos with our own data very quickly, showing potential clients the value of our services when we assemble apps for them.

We can show customers clear cost benefits and clearly effective solutions when assembling AWS services together. 

The security has great IAM, roles, and carefully partitioned permissions that allow us to fine-tune control across our applications. External intrusion attempts will never get past application boundaries, which increases trust.

The composition of apps has everything wrapped according to function and applications. We can assemble services as we go. This speeds delivery times by orders of magnitude.

The price forecasting and billing dashboard by service, with billing budgets and alerts, have helped us shut down resources that were accruing costs that we no longer needed, saving us money.

The service's power lies in its simplicity. It is great in that respect. 

The UI is constantly being improved and the billing dashboard has been improved.

Previously, we asked for more end-to-end workshops, examples, and tutorials and these have been added and improved. 

Recently, AWS has been adding improvements across services, documentation, tutorials and we have now got workshops with real-world scenarios which are tremendously useful It makes me a very happy user. 

AWS and the cloud is a space for constant learning and AWS has increased their output in that respect. 

I have been using AWS since 2014.

The solution is very stable. The only errors I encountered were my own. Some services took a few minutes to refresh and propagate across my environments, and once these had propagated, the solutions were rock solid.

The scalability is excellent. At no point have I hit scalability limits with AWS services and features. 

Customer service and tech support were excellent a few years ago when I needed them.

My general process is to explore and check options and run from a tutorial or AWS workshop. If this doesn't get me results, I then do a web search, and I generally find either further AWS docs or a specific example I can use to solve my issue. Within the last few years, my colleagues and I have been able to deliver as required. 

We did previously use a different solution when building AWS Lambda cloud functions. I could compare them directly with Azure Functions and Google Cloud and have found that the AWS Lambda solution is simpler, clearer, deploys quicker, and is generally much more simple and effective to use.

In terms of documentation, AWS is the clear leader. Their end-to-end examples and workshops are much more effective.

AWS services in many cases are deployed to AWS after being validated in Amazon.com's operations. This is evident in the ease-of-use and simplicity of many of the service features, and also in the excellent options offered for more complex services like AWS Forecast, where, for example, a checkbox and drop-down allows the user to add holidays for the country they work in when doing forecasts.

AWS has a stronger focus on business solutions than either GCP or Azure, and in many of the solutions, I have used. This is why in many cases I have switched from using other clouds, to AWS. 

The setup in AWS is a whole service in and of itself. To set up AWS applications, AWS offers a full service, CloudFormation, with some added features that allow us to automate the deployment of the full solution stack.

This makes setup complex, in that one must modify the CloudFormation template one requires and validate it. An external resource was required to check the templates. 

Once this is done, the full solution stacks are automatically deployed. 

I handled the initial setup in-house and by myself.

A recently deployed Step Function automation fulfilled all the needs of a workflow automation engine while remaining below the free operation per month, so we were able to deliver a fully automated application approval process without paying for any workflow automation engine license fees or any server hardware or infrastructure costs.

I would advise others to work from an architecture overview. 

Be aware of the very powerful schema-less data services in the cloud. They can help remove the need for data warehouses - e.g. multi-TB datasets - can be read, joined, queried and made to output daily reports within minutes, on temporary clusters, and that cost less than USD1000 per month. This is compared to the hundreds of thousands of USD for data warehouse licensing costs, plus the schema design time and ongoing DevOps they require.

Moving to serverless operations in the cloud frees up your people to deliver business services rather than spend days and days on administering data centers and the associated concerns that come with them.

I also looked at Azure and it was deemed less reliable than AWS as AWS has not had as many outages and uptime concerns as Azure has had of late. Azure Function Apps, Data Factory, Managed SQL.

Besides Azure, I looked at GCP and VMs, Cloud Functions, Speech-to-Text transcription, BigTable, and BigQuery.

Empower your in-house people to start building and running their workloads in AWS. 

Let them learn as they go. There are multiple online courses for a few dollars that can assist with specific, individual AWS services, as well as running through the AWS workshops. 

Incentivize AWS certifications. Involve your tech people with business solution prototyping. 

Tag your resources, name them well, and set budget thresholds. Assign people to tune the resources being used. Incentivize communications and publish the AWS services and features being used to deliver your business capabilities.

We use Amazon AWS to deploy our architecture.

The most valuable features are CodePipeline, CodeDeploy, CodeBuild, and CodeCommit. We use them to deliver our solution.

The services that we are using have frequent updates, at least twice a year. They provide a new version that has more capabilities or features that fit our process and procedures.

I am an integration specialist and Amazon AWS always seems to be a step ahead of the competition when it comes to the solutions integration abilities with its services.

EventBridge is a tool provided by AWS and it enables integration with the API gateway. We are using it as a solution to our projects and with our clients to integrate with external features, such as B2B or B2C. The Amazon API gateway integrates with EventBridge and other messaging layers. It is a highly integrated solution with those platforms.

I have been using this solution for approximately five years.

The solution is stable.

Amazon AWS has a very easy tool to scale in terms of scaling up and down. We have different options to do this operation and they are very useful.

The technical support has been helpful.

The setup of the solution is not so easy, it requires various skills to complete it. The whole implementation can take a month. However, different parts can take more or less time depending on the knowledge of the implementor.

The messaging layer, in general, is easy today than before when you had to create all the data centers around the world and create the steps to connect the data centers to each other. They have improved a lot over the year but they could still improve more.

Amazon AWS has pay-as-you-go options available.

It is important for people who want to use Amazon AWS to have a very good implementation strategy to make the migration. Amazon has provided some framework to help those wanting to start the migration process.

I rate Amazon AWS an eight out of ten.

AWS is part of our network, we provide services to our internal customers and we have 2,000 plus applications which sit on the VMs and different blade servers. It's a mix, we're using a hybrid environment. I manage the company network and security; we are partners with Amazon AWS.

I value the automation and the stability of this product. Whether it is S3, EC2, the LSG, ASG, for us it's all good to implement.

AWS cloud has an issue with accessibility to the customer, it's very limited and if there's an internal issue, we won't know about it because they don't expose their APIs to many things. This is a generic cloud problem for all cloud products. It's not just AWS. It's Azure, Google, all of them have the same problem. They will never give you any information, and you can't even check their logs properly. That kind of transparency issue is critical because whether I'm using their infrastructure or not, I should have visibility with regard to what is happening in my network.

I'd like to see compatibility extended to include additional applications which are widely used but not compatible on the public cloud. Without them, you can't build the ecosystems for each and every thing. I realize there are so many applications around and you can't source everything but I'd like to see additional compatibility.

The solution has some limitations because you won't have the space for some of the applications. For example, Google is the only provider with a VMware product line. Some of the applications still need a physical server.

I've been using this solution for six years. 

The support is average, just like other cloud providers. It's not so great but it's average. You can't always blame someone, but cloud architecture is like that. Visibility is an issue. They don't offer the latest services and if you don't know, you can just track back to your VMs or the services which you have deployed. 

The initial setup was quite complex. You're designing something and have downloaded the infrastructure of cloud providers which is always complex. Once you start using the solution it becomes easy. 

It is most cost-effective to go for a long-term license option, that way you get a better deal for the cloud. 

I think at the cloud maturity level, I would rate AWS first, Azure second and GCP has just started. In 2015/16, AWS had a lot of issues, but now they are coming up with better solutions and better flexibility. That said, the transparency issue is still there. 

Azure is good for the Microsoft product line and if you are using that you should go with Azure - they will give you better service. But for third parties, it's the same transparency issue, just like any other cloud provider.

I rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

We use this solution in our company and for our clients' companies.

I like the IAM, the directory, and the storage.

They should implement the command shell by default. As it is now, to open the console, you have to download the command application. When you compare with GCP, they have the command shell inbuilt.

It would make it more seamless for the administrator to include this. There are times where the machine is not connecting and you can't wait for the RDP because you have to create them quickly.

Building a shell directly from the console is a good solution. This is missing by default. there are ways that it can be done and integrated.

I have been working with Amazon AWS for six years.

Amazon AWS is very stable.

It is a scalable solution, but you can only scale-out. You can't scale up.

We have approximately 200 users in our company who are using it.

Technical support could be improved, they could be better. We don't get SLA with AWS.

They give us a specific time for a solution but they don't advise further. We have to check to see if the issue has been resolved. There should be an automatic email to notify us that the issue has been resolved, by default.

The need to work on proactiveness.

I also work with GCP and with Azure.

The initial setup is easy. It is not complex.

We have a team of 50 people who maintain all of our solutions. It's spread across the team to run 24/7.

The pricing is one of the best in the segment.

They have actually reduced their prices, with the exception of the MLD which has increased.

It's by design itself.

They have placed the pricing well for a reduced market.

I would rate Amazon AWS a seven out of ten.

It's a powerful infrastructure as a service solution, IaaS. It offers compute resources, storage, networking, and databases to quickly create your cloud infrastructure.

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.

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.

I have been using Amazon AWS for five years.

We are using the latest version.

It's very stable. It is highly reliable.

It is highly scalable. It's a very powerful platform.

In my previous organization, there were 12 people using AWS.

We have used technical support to an extent, and it's fine. We are satisfied with technical support.

I have used Azure Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and I have a bit of experience with Google Cloud as well.

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.

The installation and deployment can be done by yourself.

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.

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.

We use several tools that are part of AWS, which are onboarded to our infrastructure.

We have five or six EC2 instances that make up our AppDynamics component of the link. We are using Paperclip for restoring files, and we use other scripts as well. These are tools that we use from day-to-day.

Using AWS is really helpful for saving costs. We used to have to budget a lot for hardware costs, but now we have EC2 instances that are based on the requirements. For example, if you want one CPU then the cost is based on that, whereas if you require more, then it is automatically included.

There should be seminars and online training sessions available from AWS because a lot of people who are not using it would benefit from having the basic knowledge or basic hands-on experience. If they gain experience with it, then they will be happy to use it in the future.

Training could be in the form of more documentation or training videos. Any increase would make this solution easier to handle.

I have been using Amazon AWS for almost two years.

We use AWS on a daily basis and it is really stable.

We have more than 10,000 users on AWS and we are definitely planning to increase usage. We are the MNP and we have close to one million users in our India location.

Currently, we are introducing our web support and once we need infrastructure to be installed, we will create more instances.

The technical support is really good because whenever we we need help, we just raise a ticket and we get a solution.

I know a little bit about  Azure and GCP, but I am only really familiar with AWS. From our perspective, 60% of users implement AWS.

The initial setup is straightforward. We have the guidelines and documents from AWS, so it is easy for us. AppDynamics is also supporting us for the installation of their components. 

The time required for deployment is not long. Creating an EC2 instance only takes between 15 and 20 minutes.

We no longer need a team for the installation. When we first started, they guided us, and now we have the experience that allows us to do it on our own.

AWS and its cloud platform are getting to be well known through social sites and other sources. It is definitely a product that we recommend. We have experience with it and encourage other people to use it as well.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are providing a platform as a service to our customers, where we do not manage their end applications.

We do not manage their end workloads, and we do not have visibility into what applications they are running. We are just providing them with hosting services.

We pretty much like everything and we are excited about the seamless capability the EC2 service is offering.

We are mainly using VPC, EC2 instances, a bit of S3 and NAT Gateways, and NAT Instances.

The IEM (Infrastructure Event Management) appears to be complicated, specifically cross-account resource permissions. It's a bit complicated to implement and to understand. It requires a lot of heavy lifting. 

I am not exactly sure if we implemented it poorly, or it is the same.

Cross-validation and logging-in are areas that need improvement.

There are many variables involved in pricing the service in AWS and overall, the pricing is a bit on the higher side. If the variable in pricing could be simplified, that will also help. Sometimes, we don't use these cost optimization tools.

I have been using Amazon AWS for six months.

We just started specifically for this engagement. 

Prior to this, I had worked on AWS in my earlier engagements for quite some time.

We haven't faced any challenges. It's seamless.

Our company is, I would say, a mid-size company. The customer for whom we are onboarding on AWS, their end-users are also from a mid-size company.

Technical support is good.

We are loving this solution so far, and it has certainly reduced the time it takes to stack up new applications. 

Also, we are using it for the first time, for this customer, and they too, are loving it. Specifically, the new application launches and testing. I think they're simply having a good time with it. 

They experiment with things and tear it off when it is not needed, so they are enjoying it.

I would certainly recommend this to others, for sure.

I would rate Amazon AWS a ten out of ten. Our experience has been great!

The initial setup was straightforward to a large extent.

We are continually migrating services, as per the client's requirement. But I think a mid-size application consisting of 10 servers can take two to three weeks to get onboarded on AWS. This is starting from discovery, planning, migration, and then going live.

I think it should be less expensive. There are many variables involved in pricing, such as data transfer, and several other things. 

You have to be very precise, and really detailed, and account for each and every thing. Only then can you do an estimation of how much the application hosting will cost you. You can't afford to be missing a single piece.

There are a lot of pieces that get embedded into costing for each service. So, it's complicated, and I really wish it should have been simpler.

I use the solution in my company to use several services like ECS, EKS, and S3 while also making it easy to use its hosting services in our infrastructure. The solution is good for efficiently leveraging all the aforementioned services to host different products.

The cost of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required.

I have been using Amazon AWS for around six years.

The solution's stability is good. Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The product's scalability is good.

All the people in my company use the product. My company has engineers, software developers, site reliability engineers, and DevOps engineers who use the product.

The solution is used on a daily basis in my company.

For the purpose of scaling our company's operations, we host most of our applications on Amazon EKS. My company uses third-party open-source solutions for scalability purposes, so we are not completely dependent on Amazon AWS for autoscaling.

My company takes care of the problems related to the product. My company doesn't contact the product's technical support team. Though I have some previous experience with the product's support team, I haven't recently contacted them.

Previously, I worked with a tool on an on-premises model. I chose Amazon AWS since I wanted to use a cloud-based product.

My company is not dependent on Amazon AWS for deployment purposes since we use our own tools to handle the deployment area. My company uses Amazon AWS for the underlying platform but not for the deployment area since we have our own setup for it.

The initial setup phase may be pretty easy for those who learn to gain knowledge and expertise in Amazon AWS. At the initial stage, the product's users may look for more documentation on the tool, but I feel that the services under Amazon AWS are self-explanatory. I rate the product's initial setup phase a seven or eight out of ten.

I am a part of the team in my company that carries out the product's deployment in multiple regions.

The product's deployment process consists of a fully automated setup phase. Though my company had to be involved in a lot of engineering work in the initial phases, only around four to six members were required to take care of the deployment after the automation.

The solution can be deployed in around 10 to 15 minutes.

The tool is expensive.

As of now, our company does not need to leverage Amazon AWS for Amazon Big Data Analytics or Amazon Machine Learning. In the future, Amazon AWS can be used to leverage the benefits of Amazon Big Data Analytics or Amazon Machine Learning. Presently, my company plans to stick with the microservices model.

There is no need to maintain the product from our company's end since Amazon AWS takes care of the maintenance of the services the tool covers.

For cost saving, shut down instances when not in use and use spot instances while implementing step scaling policies. Doing regular audits, you will get to know what resources in your environment are leading to cost consumption.

AWS Global Cloud Infrastructure does not directly impact our company's application performance and availability. My company just consumes the services covered under Amazon AWS, after which we plan our application architecture. The impact is felt if Amazon removes support for some of its global products, as it may impact some legacy applications, but my company does not face many issues since we mostly upgrade such applications.

I rate the overall tool a seven or eight out of ten.