We have, for example, a big analytical platform running on top of AWS. We have many Lighthouse projects in the digital space running on AWS. We have so many things running on AWS. We use it for storage services. We use it for computing services. Its use cases are really very broad.
Manager at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees
Scalable and easy to use with its own ecosystem
Pros and Cons
- "Technical support is quite helpful."
- "The solution could always be further improved on the commercial side of things. Amazon Web Services are not cheap. It would be ideal if it was less expensive for the customer."
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
The product is very easy to use. It's flexible.
It's the leading cloud platform in the world, and it has a very wide variety of services.
The product has a very good ecosystem of its own.
The product has proven itself to be very stable.
The scalability of the product is great.
Technical support is quite helpful.
What needs improvement?
The solution could always be further improved on the commercial side of things. Amazon Web Services are not cheap. It would be ideal if it was less expensive for the customer.
For how long have I used the solution?
We've been using the solution for a couple of years at this point. We're a good AWS customer.
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability is very good. the performance is excellent. It doesn't crash or freeze. There are no bugs or glitches. Overall, it's excellent.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The solution can scale very, very well. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so without too much trouble.
Currently, I would say, the number of end-users who use applications on top of AWS is only at about 1,000.
We do have plans to continue to use the product and to expand it in the future. We will be scaling it ourselves.
How are customer service and support?
We've used technical support in the past. We've been very happy with them overall. I have no complaints. they are helpful, knowledgeable, and responsive.
How was the initial setup?
There is no installation or implementation per see. It's a cloud service. You simply have to sign up.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The solution can get rather pricey. It should be more reasonable. It's our main complaint about the product - the total cost of ownership is just too high.
We aren't buying licenses, we are buying cloud services.
What other advice do I have?
We are an enterprise with thousands of applications. We have really a broad mix of infrastructure. We have a technology standard list of several thousand products. We use a lot of AWS services. We're a customer and an end-user.
As a cloud-based solution, we're always using the latest version.
I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We've been very happy with it overall.
I would recommend the product to other users and companies.
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.
Director, Tools Engineering & Security, Data Platform
Reliable, easy to scale, easy to set up, and the support is responsive
Pros and Cons
- "It scales extremely well."
- "Price can always be cheaper."
What is our primary use case?
Our use cases are essentially infrastructure provisioning for backend services. We also use it for environment automation.
We use it for CIPD. So, this is like AWS Beanstalk. We use it for infrastructure provisioning, auto-scaling some of the container services as well, block storage, such as S3.
What is most valuable?
It's a suite of services. There is no one thing that you can pinpoint and say that this is the most valuable.
AWS definitely works for us.
What needs improvement?
There are some subjective pain points, but we are pretty satisfied.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution for six or seven years.
We are not exactly using the latest version. We are using what Amazon rolls out.
It's software or infrastructure as a service, so we use what Amazon has.
We don' use the beta products and try to stay away from them. We only use what is generally available.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It's a stable solution. It's definitely reliable, we have run enough critical business services on it.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It scales extremely well. Most things are inbuilt. It is easy to scale vertically and horizontally.
How are customer service and technical support?
It also functions on a tiering level, and that is based on what kind of customer you are.
Internally, there is some tiering on which they respond to tickets.
Overall the customer service support is pretty comfortable.
They usually respond and resolve tickets fairly quickly.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is fairly straightforward.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
They have different pricing models for each suite of services. For example, if you are with EC2; E2 has spot instances and EC2 has on instances. You can pay upfront or you can reserve an instance.
You can pay upfront or you can on an annual basis for certain machines, and you can keep them up which you get quite a competitive discount.
You can take spot instances, as in certain predefined instances, that you can spin up when you need it, but those ten to be expensive because it's ad-hoc.
You can also just go with the normal EC2 instances that are charged at the usual pricing rate.
For us, it's use-case specific and we move between all three pricing options.
Price can always be cheaper.
What other advice do I have?
As a customer, I would wholeheartedly recommend this solution to others.
From our use cases and standards, most of the things are pretty much covered, so we're happy.
I've been pretty happy with my experience with AWS. I would rate Amazon AWS a solid nine out of ten.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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November 2024
Learn what your peers think about Amazon AWS. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: November 2024.
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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
Senior Technical Support Analyst at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees
Some of the valuable features are EC2, RDS, and Route 53.
What is most valuable?
- ECS (EC2 Container Services)
- EC2
- RDS
- Route 53
How has it helped my organization?
At this point, we have been testing applications that are managed by third-parties. The benefit we see at this stage is mainly cost. We are now starting to see the benefits that the platform has to offer.
What needs improvement?
At this stage, we have found the services we are using are meeting our needs. We have been asked by management to incorporate high-security (encrypted email and data volumes) on all services. Some of the security features require extra configuration to achieve that.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Amazon AWS for about seven months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
At this point, there have been no stability issues.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scalability has been good using services like ECS, ECR Load Balancing, and Auto Scaling features.
How are customer service and technical support?
We have not had a need to engage support for any assistance.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Our previous solution was supported by a third-party. We saw the opportunity to reduce cost by managing it ourselves, in-house.
How was the initial setup?
The setup was easy at first, because a lot of the services are wizard driven. We found as we needed to customise the services further, we had to do most of this manually to get the desired result.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Pricing has been quite surprising, since we are running both DEV and UAT platforms simultaneously. It is definitely cheaper than the solution that has been managed by the third-party.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did not evaluate other options. This was the one that management had chosen. I do not believe this was based on a technical viewpoint. I just think it was decided.
What other advice do I have?
You have to be able to not think as if on-premises systems are sitting in a data centre. Everything, and I mean everything, is a service that is launched by a script. We are able to run up a platform, say UAT, entirely in about an hour. The plan will be to do this entirely by scripts.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Senior QA Manager Performance Testing & Engineering at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Enterprise-level technical support is easily accessible, and it includes a vast number of useful features
Pros and Cons
- "It has a lot of new features that make our lives easier in terms of what we want it to do in the house."
- "There are numerous use cases, and the setup varies from complicated to very simple in some cases."
What is our primary use case?
We build our own service virtualization tools. We use Amazon AWS for cloud hosting. AWS has a lot of services that we use.
What is most valuable?
Everything in AWS is valuable? AWS itself is valuable in multiple ways. Whatever I use is valuable, which is the reason we use it.
It has a lot of new features that make our lives easier in terms of what we want it to do in the house.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Amazon AWS for four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Amazon AWS is quite stable, which is why it is used by many people.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Amazon AWS is highly scalable.
How are customer service and support?
There's no tech support. AWS operates under a different model. There is no simple tech support available, as there is in other traditional methods. We have an enterprise account, so it's not like individual tickets; we have an enterprise client relationship, so it's very different.
It is easy to access them.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I've worked with a variety of service virtualization tools.we have not used anything from IBM. We don't use Azure, we use Amazon AWS. AWS as an IaaS or PaaS cloud solution.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is straightforward. However, you can't give a broad overview of your setup as it depends on your use case.
There are numerous use cases, and the setup varies from complicated to very simple in some cases. As a result, I don't want to give a generic answer.
What other advice do I have?
It's quite good, I would rate Amazon AWS a ten 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.
Owner at Global Creations Pakistan
User-friendly, stable platform with servers that are more reliable than others
Pros and Cons
- "Stable platform with a straightforward setup. It's user-friendly, with more reliable servers compared to the competition."
- "The technical support package for free trial users should be built on and improved."
What is our primary use case?
I used Amazon AWS to create a server for our local application and integrated it for clients.
What is most valuable?
What I liked most about Amazon AWS are its services and infrastructure. They're good. It's a very user-friendly platform. Its servers are also more reliable than others.
What needs improvement?
An area for improvement would be their technical support packages. They should improve the technical support packages for users on free trial. There is a gap between the user and their technical support team. My suggestion is for them to build on their support for their free trial users.
For how long have I used the solution?
I used Amazon AWS within the last 12 months, but not right now as I used it for my old project, when I was creating an EC2 server at that time. That was my virtual project, so I created an account and used the AWS services, and also created the server, but that project was closed, so the need was unmet.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Amazon AWS is so stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Amazon AWS is scalable, and I'm rating it a nine out of ten for scalability.
How was the initial setup?
Installation for this solution is not complicated. It's easy to install. It's straightforward. If I were to rate my experience with the initial setup of Amazon AWS, with five being the best and one being the worst, I'm giving it a five out of five.
What about the implementation team?
Amazon AWS was deployed in-house. I didn't use any integrator, reseller, or consultant.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I was working with Alibaba Cloud before I worked with Amazon AWS. Alibaba Cloud is comparatively more difficult than Amazon AWS.
I also evaluated Google Cloud and the main differences between Amazon AWS and these other products include how Amazon AWS was easy to use, user-friendly, and its infrastructure.
What other advice do I have?
I've also used the server I built via Amazon AWS for our Android applications, and found the reliability and the stability of that server to really good. I can use it again next time when I'm into development. The server's always good.
I had four customers on Amazon AWS. Those customers were architects working in technology and IT companies.
I also created a server for our taxi application client as one of my projects. I have a local user.
I had three to four people for deployment and maintenance. Some were nontechnical, while some were technical, with an IT background.
Because I was on the free trial version of Amazon AWS, I didn't get to use their technical support.
I used the free trial of Amazon AWS for my clients. I used it during the testing period. I developed applications for clients, then recommended AWS servers to them for the applications.
I highly recommend this platform to others who are considering using it, because its stability is good.
We have different requirements vs other users, so I'm not in a position to recommend features, especially because I have not used all the features of Amazon AWS. I can't say that this feature is good, or that feature is bad. I can't say which features to add to the next release.
I'm rating Amazon AWS a nine out of ten and this is both from an integrator and customer perspective.
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.
Customer Success Manager - Architect: Cloud and Data Platform at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
User friendly solution
Pros and Cons
- "User friendly solution."
- "Friendly console for implementation."
- "Requires better integration with other cloud products."
What is our primary use case?
My company is a reseller of Amazon AWS. We have approximately 500 users.
I am a multi-cloud engineer and I am certified with AWS. Our primary use case is to set costs and cost integration on the cloud as well as some databases.
What is most valuable?
The cost of Amazon AWS is similar to Azure and has the same value. It is a user friendly solution.
What needs improvement?
AWS could use better integration with other products and clouds. Multi-cloud is an important solution for cost savings.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using AWS for six months.
How are customer service and support?
Amazon AWS provides good support.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is easy, it's a friendly console for implementation.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The licensing costs is billed monthly.
What other advice do I have?
If you are considering Amazon AWS you should think about the cost of solutions and the ability to create systems and instances.
I would rate this solution a 9 out of 10.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Data Scientist at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
Scales well, works fast, and offers great price forecasting
Pros and Cons
- "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."
- "I don't have complaints. Previously, we asked for more end-to-end workshops, examples, and tutorials and these have been added and improved."
What is our primary use case?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using AWS since 2014.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability is excellent. At no point have I hit scalability limits with AWS services and features.
How are customer service and technical support?
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.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What about the implementation team?
I handled the initial setup in-house and by myself.
What was our ROI?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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