We are using it for certain business applications.
Associate Vice President at Hitachi Systems, Ltd.
Has good scalability
Pros and Cons
- "The scalability is a valuable feature."
- "The pricing is expensive"
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
The scalability is a valuable feature.
What needs improvement?
The improvement should be done as per business needs.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Amazon AWS for five years.
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is a stable solution.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is a scalable solution. Presently, 3,000 users are using the solution.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is straightforward.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing is expensive.
What other advice do I have?
Overall, I would rate the solution a nine 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.
Last updated: Mar 18, 2024
Flag as inappropriateSoftware Developer at Generate Impact
Great documentation with an excellent community and a reasonable pricing structure
Pros and Cons
- "The pricing model is good. It's pay-as-you-go."
- "It would be ideal if they could provide automatic health reports. That way, I would be able to understand at a glance the state of my services at any given time."
What is our primary use case?
I use the solution for deploying some applications that use cloud computing.
What is most valuable?
It offers a lot of tools, which we leverage.
At the moment I'm using Lambda service and also AC2 machines - as a platform as a service and infrastructure as a service.
The pricing model is good. It's pay-as-you-go. You only pay for what you use.
The solution offers a lot of very helpful documentation. There's also a great community that surrounds it that is quite helpful if you have questions or want to learn something.
What needs improvement?
Personally, I need to improve myself in terms of the knowledge I have around the product. My goal is to maybe get certified in order to understand it better. It would be helpful if they would be able to provide me with more certification information.
It's a good platform. I don't have any issues with it at the moment.
It would be ideal if they could provide automatic health reports. That way, I would be able to understand at a glance the state of my services at any given time.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used the solution for three or four years at this point.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is stable. We have many items deployed in AWS and we haven't had any issues. there are no bugs or glitches. It's problem-free.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
AWS provides us with a lot of tools for deploying automatically when we are working, for example, in a new feature. We have options for automatic deployments and don't have issues with size.
How are customer service and support?
There's a lot of great documentation and community support. I'm learning a lot and can find any answers I need there.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I'm working with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Computing right now.
How was the initial setup?
I work with my customer's solutions and I deploy into AWS to provide the end product for my customers. I don't directly deal with AWS implementations themselves.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing is good and it's set up as a pay-as-you-go. It's not overly expensive.
What other advice do I have?
I'm just a customer and an end-user.
I'd highly recommend the solution to other users. It's one of the best cloud options out there right now.
I'd rate the solution at an eight 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.
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.
Associate Vice President at Hitachi Systems, Ltd.
Secure, highly scalable, and reliable
Pros and Cons
- "Amazon AWS has improved a lot on security and is very good. Additionally, You can integrate your own security into their AWS platform."
What is our primary use case?
Amazon AWS can be used for storage, networking, and for many of the services they have available, such as databases, new site launches, and quick deployments.
What is most valuable?
Amazon AWS has improved a lot on security and is very good. Additionally, You can integrate your own security into their AWS platform.
The reporting and analytics monitoring are very good features and we are using them extensively.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Amazon AWS for approximately seven years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I have found Amazon AWS to be stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Amazon AWS is highly scalable.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We have previously used older servers solutions from Dell, HP, and IBM.
How was the initial setup?
The installation of this solution is straightforward.
What about the implementation team?
The amount of people we need for the deployment depends on the use case and what type of business operations you are running. You can start with one resource based on the requirements and you can add the people as you need them. The majority of the people you will need will be for DevOps and you can scale your team as per your requirements. You can start with one at the beginning stage but you could end up needing a hundred thousand people but this depends on the business growth and many factors.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing model of Amazon AWS is very good because there is an option to pay for what you use only, you do not have to give any money upfront to use it. However, we have some instances where we are on a monthly plan.
When you compare Amazon AWS to Microsoft Azure, the pricing of both is almost the same. There are some instances when one is cheaper than the other in one area but it is difficult to pinpoint which one is cheaper because it depends upon a lot of factors, such as the use case. However, the overall price of both solutions could be reduced.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I have evaluated Microsoft Azure.
What other advice do I have?
A lot of organizations are moving from on-premise solutions to the cloud. There are a lot of case studies already in the marketplace which you can go there and find case study solutions to your business requirements.
I would recommend this solution to others.
I rate Amazon AWS a nine 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.
CTO at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Plenty of connectors, high performance, and reliable
Pros and Cons
- "Amazon is a really good solution with high performance. They offer more connectors than some of their competitors, such as Microsoft Azure."
- "Amazon AWS could improve by being more secure and adding more features."
What is our primary use case?
I was using Amazon AWS in the medical market in my previous employment.
What is most valuable?
Amazon is a really good solution with high performance. They offer more connectors than some of their competitors, such as Microsoft Azure.
What needs improvement?
Amazon AWS could improve by being more secure and adding more features.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Amazon AWS for approximately six years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Amazon AWS in my experience has been more stable than Microsoft Azure.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The solution is scalable.
We have approximately 50 customers that are using the solution.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We have moved from Amazon AWS to Microsoft Azure. I have found that both solutions perform very well. The main reason we switched was to allow us to manage where the data was to be stored. We wanted a data storage solution in France which most of our customers were requesting. Two years ago, Amazon did not have any solution to provide any storage in France.
How was the initial setup?
The level of difficulty for the installation of Amazon AWS is similar to Microsoft Azure. They are very difficult.
What about the implementation team?
We have a five-person team of DevOps and architects that do the implementation and maintenance of the solution.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
If I was going to compare the cost of Amazon AWS to Microsoft Azure, they are approximately the same.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend this solution to others.
I rate Amazon AWS an eight 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
Manager at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees
Very good automation, flexible with cloud maturity
Pros and Cons
- "Very good automation and very stable."
- "Customer access to APIs is limited so that logs cannot be checked properly."
What is our primary use case?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using this solution for six years.
How are customer service and technical support?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It is most cost-effective to go for a long-term license option, that way you get a better deal for the cloud.
What other advice do I have?
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.
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: Partner
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?
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.
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.
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 technical 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.
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
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