We host the service for customer products. Those services are utilized by different product lines, which can be used on AWS.
Senior Manager, Engineering at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
Robust, scalable, user-friendly, and support included when deployed
Pros and Cons
- "One of the features offered is scalability on demand."
- "It works very well with open-source solutions like Java, but not with .NET technologies."
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
One of the features offered is scalability on demand.
It's user-friendly.
What needs improvement?
There are some areas that are not great. For example, with some Microsoft technologies such as .NET, you will have a difficult time deploying it on AWS. It works very well with open-source solutions like Java, but not with .NET technologies.
I would like to see more alerts added to the system. Preemptive alerts would be very good. It is something that happens and you have to do a lot of configuration at that time, which can be complex.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution for ten years.
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It's stable and a pretty robust solution.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It's a scalable solution that features scalability on demand, which is working perfectly fine.
We change the core on demand. We can increase the capacity on demand.
We have 10,000 users in our organization who are using this solution.
How are customer service and support?
We have dedicated support. Once we have deployed it, support comes as part of the service because it is incorporated with the solution.
We get all of the support that we need.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was definitely complex, but not because of AWS. It is complex because we need to upgrade to be compatible with AWS, which is related to the product and not AWS. The setup of AWS is straightforward.
We deployed it in a cluster way. Initially, it took a week to set everything up.
The first time it took longer, then became straightforward. It only takes a couple of hours now.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Licensing can be purchased on a yearly basis, which is an auto-renewal. We also have an on-demand on-pay purchase.
If, for example, we have provisions for other things and we have a three-peak season then we add more core, more hardware for the on-premises machines. During those periods it is on-demand but the rest of the time it is licensed with a yearly subscription.
The pricing is reasonable.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend this solution but there are some areas that need improvement. It doesn't integrate well with some technologies and preemptive alerts would be very helpful.
I am happy with this solution, and I would rate Amazon AWS a nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Private Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Technical Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Plays well with MuleSoft CloudHub and gives us access to proven infrastructure, tools, and technologies
Pros and Cons
- "The reason I like AWS is that they have a large market share and a large presence. When it comes to our use case, a big positive is that MuleSoft and AWS are working together very well. So instead of competing against each other, they're meshing together."
- "There have been some issues in the past when it comes to file integrations in AWS's cloud products. However, there are now alternative solutions out there that are helping to integrate them all."
What is our primary use case?
We use Amazon AWS together with MuleSoft's CloudHub, because CloudHub is an extension of Amazon VPC. As part of that, when we set up the infrastructure and everything, we will be interacting with Amazon products. And with big customers, we have data in the private cloud and within that private cloud we have the MuleSoft CloudHub which is connected through the organization's private cloud to a specific geographical AWS public cloud. Regarding security, we also have a number of layers there, too.
As an example, we have seen approximately 300 ETFs developed for different areas, e.g. for United Arab Emirates and other customers. And the internal customers are also using AWS. All in all, there are approximately 10,000+ users who are using it, and things are going pretty well.
What is most valuable?
The reason I like AWS is that they have a large market share and a large presence. When it comes to our use case, a big positive is that MuleSoft and AWS are working together very well. So instead of competing against each other, they're meshing together.
What needs improvement?
There have been some issues in the past when it comes to file integrations in AWS's cloud products. However, there are now alternative solutions out there that are helping to integrate them all.
One thing is that sometimes it becomes a problem when troubleshooting our tools because when you have some things local and some things remote on a foreign server, it can get complicated. We find that sometimes it's a challenge to gather the necessary information from logs and such because you need the proper agreement to capture those details.
In the future, I would like to see Amazon move more into local clouds, by capturing more of the small market. Nowadays, spending a lot of money is not on the list of priorities for many companies, especially considering what's going on in the world. We want to leverage whatever amount is available and still get all the benefits of new AWS cloud offerings.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Amazon AWS for a couple of years now.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The infrastructure of AWS is very stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
AWS is very scalable.
How are customer service and technical support?
I've never worked with technical support personally because we have a lot of network engineers to handle that.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
When it comes to pricing, not all applications require that much performance. That's the reason why other cloud markets are also catching up, because the two predominantly high-performance platforms, AWS and GCP, are almost the same.
Looking at the primary market for AWS, I see that there's a lot of customers who have only mid-level performance requirements, because you will have all these normal applications such as online auction websites, gaming applications, voice applications, and so on. These are not, for example, large monitoring applications, financial independents, or brick and mortar companies. So AWS caters to about 40% of the market when it comes to general applications.
As it happens, in many cases, you simply don't need the high-performance offerings from AWS, nor the innovative products from Google Cloud Platform, which can come with large price tags.
What other advice do I have?
Overall, AWS is pretty good and I can definitely recommend it because it's a proven product. When you're solving big problems, you want — first and foremost — proven infrastructure, technology, tools, and mechanisms. Then slowly, you'll be able to remove dependencies by moving to others as needed. So for project initiation and everything, you get to rely on something which is rock solid and proven in the industry with a long track record.
I know AWS can be an expensive option, but it doesn't have to be out of budget if you choose the appropriate level of product for your performance requirements. They can provide high-performance computing resources, while at the same time catering to the mid-level market with lower performance offerings.
Previously, in the initial days of AWS, back in 2005/2006, there were some concerns about security and such things, but nowadays there is not much to worry about because a lot of those concerns have been taken care of. Recently, there has been another shift in attitude towards them, because not everybody is a big fan of public cloud because of what is happening in the world with respect to data privacy and everything.
Regardless, the three big names of Microsoft, Google, and AWS are really grabbing the market, and IBM is also catching up well. Because of the data privacy concerns, however, I do see some customization in European countries who are interested in interacting with the cloud market at a more local level.
I would rate Amazon AWS 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.
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Amazon AWS
November 2024
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Assistant General Manager, Information Technology & Infrastructure at a real estate/law firm with 10,001+ employees
Easy to provision new virtual services, easy to scale, and has most of the infrastructure components
Pros and Cons
- "It is quite easy to provision new virtual services for our use. The procedures are quite straightforward and simple as compared to other competitors, such as Microsoft or Huawei. This is what we are happy about with Amazon AWS. It is pretty mature in terms of the availability of most of the infrastructure components. If you want to deploy a server on your platform, everything is already there in terms of the operating system, network components, securities, and data encryption. It is also quite scalable and stable."
- "Our use case is limited to virtual services and RPA development. We are not using it quite heavily, and there are not many issues or problems so far. However, it would be great if it could be integrated with more AI features and proactive monitoring. It could also have more automatic capacity expansion features. For example, when renting out some space, memory, or computing power, the service can have the capacity to expand by itself without being manually handled by us."
What is our primary use case?
It has been useful for running virtual services for some of our internal applications. Some of the developers are using it for doing some kind of development work on robotics process automation or RPA.
What is most valuable?
It is quite easy to provision new virtual services for our use. The procedures are quite straightforward and simple as compared to other competitors, such as Microsoft or Huawei. This is what we are happy about with Amazon AWS.
It is pretty mature in terms of the availability of most of the infrastructure components. If you want to deploy a server on your platform, everything is already there in terms of the operating system, network components, securities, and data encryption. It is also quite scalable and stable.
What needs improvement?
Our use case is limited to virtual services and RPA development. We are not using it quite heavily, and there are not many issues or problems so far. However, it would be great if it could be integrated with more AI features and proactive monitoring. It could also have more automatic capacity expansion features. For example, when renting out some space, memory, or computing power, the service can have the capacity to expand by itself without being manually handled by us.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution for two to three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is quite stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is quite scalable. It is easy to expand and unsubscribe. In terms of the number of users, we have ten administrators from the IT side.
How are customer service and technical support?
We have interacted with them. They are quite responsive to our inquiries.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was easy.
What about the implementation team?
It was pretty much done by our in-house developers.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Licensing is on a yearly basis. I believe we are satisfied with the current pricing. Otherwise, we would have switched to another vendor.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend this solution. Amazon AWS cloud is pretty mature in terms of availability for most of the infrastructure components. It is a one-stop shop that gives everybody simple steps to get things done, which is great.
I would rate Amazon AWS an eight out of ten.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Manager of DevOps at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
It's easy to configure and has high availability
Pros and Cons
- "AWS is easier to implement than other solutions, and it's more reliable."
- "Amazon support could be better."
What is our primary use case?
AWS is deployed into a public cloud. We have five lines and everything is autotomized. We are using several AWS solutions, including Containers, Pierre, Stargate, and Lambda. We have several projects in production, but I can't disclose more details because it's confidential.
What is most valuable?
AWS is easier to implement than other solutions, and it's more reliable.
What needs improvement?
It would be helpful for us if we could easily integrate Oracle RDS with AWS. That would work well with the solutions we have in place.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
AWS is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We can quickly add resources with AWS when necessary. Our company currently has 200 users working with AWS.
How are customer service and support?
Amazon support could be better.
How was the initial setup?
Deploying AWS is easy. The amount of time it takes depends on the application. I couldn't give a precise estimate of the number of minutes. We have four engineers to manage and maintain the solution.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
We pay about $20,000 per month, and the license is all-inclusive.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We are compared AWS with Azure and IBM Cloud, but in the end, we decided to work with AWS.
What other advice do I have?
I rate Amazon AWS 10 out of 10. For me, it's perfect. AWS is effortless to configure and has high availability.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Software Architect at AIOPS group
Very stable and scalable, but could use more integration
Pros and Cons
- "One of the most valuable things about it, besides the stability, is that you can forget about infrastructure because you're just doing it on AWS. I remember the times before AWS and other cloud solutions existed, and it was a huge pain to get real hardware, put it inside, configure everything, report everything, and do a scale. It was very, very difficult compared to how it is now. Not even just AWS, but what all these cloud providers are doing, I would say, is a huge advancement in technology."
- "AWS could be improved with more integration, but I can see that they're developing these features and working very hard on their platform."
What is our primary use case?
Our primary use case of AWS, for most projects, is for hosting on AWS and developing locally, as well as testing some AWS environments. We are mostly using this platform from a developer point of view. AWS is our cloud platform by choice.
What is most valuable?
One of the most valuable things about it, besides the stability, is that you can forget about infrastructure because you're just doing it on AWS. I remember the times before AWS and other cloud solutions existed, and it was a huge pain to get real hardware, put it inside, configure everything, report everything, and do a scale. It was very, very difficult compared to how it is now. Not even just AWS, but what all these cloud providers are doing, I would say, is a huge advancement in technology.
What needs improvement?
AWS could be improved with more integration, but I can see that they're developing these features and working very hard on their platform.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with AWS for a few years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Amazon AWS is very stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
One of the major points for AWS is the scalability that comes with it. You can monitor it really well, and you can even adjust down, or sometimes up. What this technology allows is very nice.
AWS is predominantly used in most of the projects that we have. In my organization, there are thousands of users who are using AWS.
How are customer service and support?
I have never personally contacted tech support.
How was the initial setup?
There isn't really an installation for AWS, but you will need certain certificates to download the interface. I generated some certificates, put them on my machine, and then used them to connect to AWS services.
It depends on the project, but there is usually only one guy needed for deployment. For bigger, more complex platforms, you may need two or three guys to deploy AWS.
What about the implementation team?
I implemented AWS myself.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
You pay for a license, and that's how you get your own account. These are usually not individual licenses, but rather for a group of people. I think these licenses come at some volume, but I don't know many details about the licensing.
What other advice do I have?
I rate AWS a five out of ten, but it's mainly because I don't feel very experienced in AWS. I have gone to the console many times and seen many features that I have never used. I'm sure I can learn quickly, though, because there is a lot of information shared on the internet about how to use it—there are a lot of resources that you can use to learn, and there are a lot of features available on AWS. They're working very hard on their platform, and I can only see their usage growing in the future.
I would certainly recommend AWS to others.
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.
Corporate IT Applications Manager at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
Robust, easy straightforward, and works well for our e-commerce solution
Pros and Cons
- "The stability is magnificent, it's spectacular."
- "When you are first starting, the initial setup can be a bit complex, but it gets easier after that."
What is our primary use case?
We use Amazon AWS as an IaaS Cloud for our e-commerce sites.
How has it helped my organization?
Because of the stability and scalability AWS provides, our team can now focus on how to engage and delight our customers instead of constantly being fixing production issues.
What is most valuable?
We have not had any problems at all.
In the 4 years that we have been using IaaS services from Amazon, we have not had any issues.
It's a great IaaS cloud. They are the leaders. No cloud provider can match Amazon right now.
Other providers are improving year over year, but Amazon is still ahead at least two years.
What needs improvement?
Working with AWS requieres your organization to invest in training your team to better use and take advantaje of all that AWS has to offer.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using this solution for 4 years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
AWS provides without a doubt the most mature and stable IaaS cloud in the market.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have thousands of customers who are going to our websites to purchase goods and it takes a matter of minutes to scale the infrastructure both horizontally or vertically.
How are customer service and technical support?
Great services, assistance and response time from the AWS team
How was the initial setup?
It depends on how complex is the architecture of the solution to be deployed, in our case because Magento is sort of "native" for AWS it has been straightforward.
What about the implementation team?
We implement through a vendor team specialized implementing and managing Magento on AWS
What other advice do I have?
I would 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.
AWS Certified Solutions Architect y Cloud Application Developer at Honne Services
Helps us migrate clients to the cloud with ease, and allows us to provide a wide range of cloud services that live in AWS ecosystem and can interact with on-premises data centers
Pros and Cons
- "The AWS feature that I most enjoy is Lambda functions. I primarily use serverless components because they allow you to process things without having to compromise on resources like when running EC2 instances or virtual machines. With minimal effort, you can scale up an unlimited number of processes, even concurrently, to process things. I frequently work with web APIs, so I use Lambda a lot in this area."
- "Recently we had a long conversation about functionality that is missing in Alexa — in Mexico, specifically. Alexa for Business is a service and platform that Americans can use to make a call to an Amazon Echo device or a telephone via the app. But in Mexico, we are not allowed to use that technology. This is a significant disadvantage of AWS for those living in Mexico."
What is our primary use case?
I am an AWS Certified Solution Architect Associate as well as a Certified Cloud Practitioner, and I am currently pursuing the development specialty. I mainly use AWS to develop cloud solutions for clients.
As a Solution Architect Associate with focus on development, my clients typically ask me to help them personalize AWS services as they pertain to the client's business. For example, I will often work with AWS SQS queues, ETL jobs, APIs and storage, and other services offered by AWS in the cloud.
Generally, my work has more to do with development rather than architecture, and other AWS services that I use include EC2, S3, Lambda, API Gateway, Amazon Connect, Alexa, DynamoDB, ECS, and EKS.
My daily activities are essentially focused around implementing AWS services for clients who want to migrate their existing computing infrastructure to the cloud. For example, if a data center is on-premise, our solution is to bring that data center to the cloud. This kind of migration includes moving all the applications that a company uses to the cloud in progressive steps. We also work to enhance their applications with extra code and the advanced features that the AWS cloud offers, like Lambda for instance.
The clients that I work with — which include large organizations like universities — also use cloud providers other than AWS, including 3Cloud, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. I, however, specialize only in AWS and Azure.
How has it helped my organization?
Here is an example of how AWS has helped one of our clients: With Amazon Connect, we can track all activity in the past and in real-time, so we can know how many calls are in progress and if there are any problems. With a student payment system, for example, if a student has a problem because their credit card was rejected, we're able to trigger an SMS notification to somebody so they can contact the student to make a payment with a different form.
The university is thus able to offer a streamlined payment service with automatic fallback options (e.g. receiving payments with a card reader in person) and all of this is automated thanks to AWS Lambda, which lets us handle customized metrics automatically and in real time.
What is most valuable?
The AWS feature that I most enjoy is Lambda functions. I primarily use serverless components because they allow you to process things without having to compromise on resources like when running EC2 instances or virtual machines. With minimal effort, you can scale up an unlimited number of processes, even concurrently, to process things. I frequently work with web APIs, so I use Lambda a lot in this area.
What needs improvement?
Recently we had a long conversation about functionality that is missing in Alexa — in Mexico, specifically. Alexa for Business is a service and platform that Americans can use to make a call to an Amazon Echo device or a telephone via the app. But in Mexico, we are not allowed to use that technology. This is a significant disadvantage of AWS for those living in Mexico.
I also think that Amazon Rekognition could be improved. For example, I have used Rekognition to label things like trucks, buses, etc. Then we put a camera in front of a bus, so that we can send notifications if the bus driver overtakes another car on the wrong side of the road. However, it seems that Rekognition's machine learning doesn't yet have the capabilities needed to make this kind of labeling and recognition system work properly. Thus, we've had to resort to alternative solutions.
And in terms of how easy it is to learn, Amazon doesn't have the most friendly educational platform. It is very obtuse, in fact. I have wasted a lot of time and effort studying through the official channels, so now I mostly use Udemy courses instead. They are very practical and much simpler, but I would still prefer to learn from the official educational platform if it were improved.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using AWS for about five years now.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability of AWS is very good.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I work with AWS Lambda all the time and I never have any problems with scaling. Recently, Lambda launched a new billing system, which is cost per millisecond. Before, we would get cost per hundred milliseconds, as the minimum, and now if we use only 10 milliseconds, then the cost for 10 milliseconds is exactly how much we have to pay. So that's great, because now I can scale my functions with a precise cost calculation.
How are customer service and technical support?
I currently have several issues with Amazon Connect because we can only obtain two telephone numbers by default. With this scenario, there was a very difficult process to let Amazon know that we are not working for ourselves in our console, and that we offer our services as a third party, in terms of SaaS and IaaS, to our customers.
I'm not directly involved in the creation of accounts, and I just use them once they are created on the company or client's side. But in Amazon Connect, when we needed to add more users, the time response from Amazon was two or three days. We are subscribed to the developer support plan, and I think two or three days is a lot of time.
How was the initial setup?
Either my company or the clients usually have the console already set up when I start work on it, so there's not much in the way of setup that I can comment on.
What about the implementation team?
With the AWS projects that I lead for clients, it's basically just me that works on deployment, implementation, and maintenance.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
When it comes to professional certification in AWS, I implore others to study hard before your exams because $300 is a painful waste of money if you fail.
With AWS products, there is a steep learning curve and I think there are so many aspects because it is really an ecosystem. If you are committed to reducing costs, or increasing performance, or optimizing in any manner, you have to know the solution really well.
I think the best way to achieve this is by experience, but if you don't have any experience, studying hard is the next best thing to do.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
The two alternatives I've considered are Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. However, because I am only certified in AWS, I don't know the difference between, for example, Microsoft functions in Azure and AWS Lambda functions in a commercial sense.
In a technical sense, though, AWS seems to be more comprehensive in the programming languages that it supports. For example, with AWS Lambda functions I can program in Python, PHP, Go, and many others, but with functions in Azure, you are limited to fewer options.
To our client, it's neither here nor there, because they're typically not involved in the actual development, but if you use Azure architecture then you're going to be limited to the programming languages that Microsoft supports.
What other advice do I have?
If you want to take advantage of all the benefits that AWS offers, then it's best to take the time to learn how the entire ecosystem, and each part of it, works.
I would rate Amazon AWS a nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Hybrid 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: Advance Consulting Partner
Lead Cyber Security and Hybrid Cloud Engineer at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
A secure solution for commercial data analytics and storage
Pros and Cons
- "We have seen an improvement in our infrastructure, as the code makes it very easy to deploy quickly to AWS."
- "An easier way to determine estimated costs quickly would be helpful."
What is our primary use case?
Our primary use case for this solution is commercial cloud computing, analytics, and storage.
How has it helped my organization?
We have seen an improvement in our infrastructure, as the code makes it very easy to deploy quickly to AWS.
What is most valuable?
The features that we have found most valuable are IAM, KMS, and Security Groups for customizable security. Cloud formation for well-defined blueprints is also useful.
What needs improvement?
An easier way to determine estimated costs quickly would be helpful.
For how long have I used the solution?
Three to five years.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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