Amazon EC2 Reviews

We are using EC2 only for our test and backup servers, not really as a proxy server. Few users are working with EC2. It's only 10 people.

EC2 provides a lot of flexibility. If you don't want to have a separate on-premise database, you can put it on the cloud with EC2. You can adjust the instance type according to your needs. You select a size and get a certain amount of specific memory, CPUs, etc. You set the redirect limit, and from there, you install the software, database servers, application servers, and whatever you want. 

The monitoring part could be improved. When we're building and configuring things or doing database replication, EC2's monitoring could provide more information. It's hard to find the information I need in the graphs they provide.

I've been using EC2 for about seven years.

Amazon support is good.

We didn't switch to EC2 per se. We are still using all the solutions we had before. We still have our on-premise databases.

Installing EC2 is straightforward. You set your user access and build it. It only takes about 10 to 20 minutes next. A single person can deploy it.

EC2 costs more than typical on-prem solutions, but there are tradeoffs because you can reduce infrastructure and staffing costs.

The price of EC2 is on the higher end. There is no license. You pay for server data and usage like Amazon RDS.

I rate Amazon EC2 10 out of 10. I highly recommend EC2. You should go for it if you can afford it.

I primarily use Amazon AWS and EC2 services. The primary use case is to spawn servers quickly with a particular hardware memory, CPU, and storage footprint. It gives me a hardware service quickly, I can get a virtual machine with Linux installed with a particular storage configuration. I can also configure the security and bring it up. 

Practically, it gives me a mini data center in one or two minutes. 

We need to bring a large number of servers to do our jobs. We do a lot of crawling jobs hosted in AWS. We have templates available to us to bring a pool of servers up and running, hardware as a service. 

In our use case, it's not the number of users using the solution, it's more the number of processes that respond. Based on the compressions and the jobs we do or sometimes we crawl, so the scaling is more in terms of the amount of data acquisition we do.

The ability to bring up servers and then do the computation and deposit means we don't have to maintain a data center. Everything is virtual and the security is also taken care of. It helps us to achieve compliance. Being a small startup with the security features that AWS provides helps us with compliance.

The encryption, storage, physical security, and data security features at the protocol and storage level, helps us as an organization to achieve greater compliance and keep our business running in a secure fashion.

The features I find valuable are EC2, the admin control, and the ability to add the elastic IPs and then attach storage; all of those features are valuable. Also, the Admin Control, Cost Explorer, and the billing features are valuable. That gives me the ability to understand the costs. Amazon AWS has some savings plans. 

In cloud computing, people think the cloud is cheap, but you need to know how to use it and configure the right plans. 

AWS Cost Explorer and the billing features are also valuable. 

S3 buckets and fast storage are also very nice features. 

In terms of improvement, they could build some client-side desktop tools that provide easier connectivity to Amazon. 

I have been using Amazon AWS for 3 years.

In terms of availability and stability, they have not been an issue so far. I've used it in all previous organizations for very large-scale deployments and they're working fine. 
We are not seeing any outages because of Amazon, except if we are using spot instances, they can go down at any moment. We will only use these when we can afford server downtime, so not for production. They sometimes can go down for an hour and so on, but other than that the EC2 instances are fairly stable and great, we have not had an issue so far. 

Scaling is not a problem because they themselves give you Amazon auto-scaling features. Very few users know how to use it properly. Our VM and images should be properly packaged and then you have to configure it. The load boxes have to be configured, you need to do some configuration, then you can basically vertically scale by choosing a server with a larger memory footprint, or you can go for horizontal scaling by adding more configuration into it. It's scaling over the box. 

I've never had to use Amazon support services yet. I've not opened any tickets so far, I don't have first-hand experience of going through the support process with Amazon. I have been supported by their enablement teams that work with startups, they are fairly good. 

I've been using AWS for quite a while, there are some use cases where I have not directly used any other cloud product so far, I mostly stick to Amazon. 

The initial setup is more or less straightforward for a developer. For somebody who is not from a pure development background it obviously requires you to understand what a public IP address is. You need to understand what storage is and then how to use it. It's mostly for developers and administrators, not for a non-technical audience; for people who can configure a server and have technical background. 

We mostly implement everything on our own, we don't have to bring in a consultant. The only time we brought in a consultant from AWS itself was to take up the offer of a free review of our infrastructure and they will help us to optimize. They advise on which plan based on our use case. Other than that, most of the technical documentation is available and we can operate on our own. 

If we already have the script and everything available, the deployment takes no more than half an hour. We already have the templates, but the template development, the scripts, all the tools development will take some time, maybe a month or so depending on the use case. But, once you have them set up, it's basically a matter of 15 minutes to half an hour.
There were no annual or monthly licensing costs as it's completely based on usage. Depending on how many hours of use, the instance we run, and the storage we use, you get a very detailed account of usage in your billing document. 

I did not go through an evaluation process beforehand, mostly it was chosen by the organizations. I did evaluate other vendors on cost optimization to see whether switching to another vendor would improve cost.

I wanted to optimize the infrastructure to see whether the problem is with the way we use it or if Amazon itself is expensive. I was able to bring down the cost with some of the cleanups and saving plans they offer. 

We plan to increase usage as our business expands, we will grow with AWS as it expands.
In terms of the EC2 services, it's an amazing product, in terms of the computational power and the flexibility and then the number of features and services they provide, it's awesome actually.

I would rate it a ten out of ten.

We have a couple of primary use cases. We have an internal password server that we use for one of them. The other use case is file transfer. We have set apart an in-house SFTP process and it is all there. ETL enterprise trends and the data transformation process also run on one of the servers.

We have databases that run on one of the EC2 docs. We have a direct database that runs AWS Postgres. We don't separate that, but we do have a part of the business that runs on the server as well.

My company has a couple of servers on EC2 that we manage across defined regions. We have roughly 11 servers currently in operation for live production services and around 5 staging environments.

We have Windows and Linux servers. I think there are less Linux servers than Windows at present. I would say there are two to three Linux centers and the rest are Windows. That's what we use. Of course we have detailed information of what we do but I can't go into too much information because our company is public.

I wouldn't say it's improved our company, to be honest, because sometimes we do have issues with it. Because as much as the increase in data storage is good it is also a problem. That is because of the cost. But I would say it's good because it helps us. I would say AWS generally helps us. I'm going to talk a bit about other AWS applications, because it's kind of difficult to just dwell on EC2 and not talk about other applications since we do not just use EC2.

We also use Cloud HSM. Cloud HSM is easy to install. It has really helped us in regard to security. Now we can have our own key to encrypt our stuff. And having EC2 available is also very useful because sometimes with the configuration of Amazon stuff, if it's not done on Amazon Linux servers, it gets pretty difficult to wiggle your way around it. But with the Amazon Linux server, it's just on the fly because of their image. The fact that Amazon has their own image really helps to make your job easier and faster to configure and save.

The features that I have found most valuable are that we can increase the storage of EC2. This is very helpful because sometimes when it comes to data transformation in far transfer, it gets really big because of the number of clients we have. Then we have to find a way to sort out archive data, etc.

It really makes it easy to either transfer data as an S3 bucket or increase the drive storage on the server. That is really useful. Another thing I really like about the services is that you can install Trend Micro Security on it. Most of the AWS services have gone with Trend Micro Security, which you can get installed on it. It helps to protect the servers and gives you that additional level of security.

In terms of what could be improved, it depends on the server. I would say they are so much better these days with updates, especially when it comes to Linux servers and there are so many material updates. AWS is really on the ball with ensuring that security practices are there, etc.. Windows is just the same old Windows. The problem is not Amazon but Windows itself.

I have been using Amazon EC2 for five years.

It is pretty stable regarding downtime. We probably get one downtime a month, for a few seconds up to a minute, but it rarely happens. The helpful thing about having EC2 instances is that you have CloudWatch. So it gives you logs of your downtime or the off time of the server. It gives you all that information if something is gone wrong with your server and you can fix it.

Amazon EC2 is highly scalable. But one thing I found that may be an issue is moving from one instance type to another. Because I found that you can't just switch instances. It seems you're limited to a certain category depending on the one you initially started with. But I'm not a hundred percent sure because I've only found that issue on one server and I know we've switched instance types before. Maybe just with that particular server I can't switch out of the categories of instances. I have to remain on the I's and I can't go to the M's or the C's or anything like that. I don't know if it's specific to that instance, though.

I don't know how many users are on it in total. I'd say less than 10. Most of them do data integration and team reporting, sometimes IT administration, and security, which is my team.

I haven't used technical support for EC2. I've used it for other AWS solutions, but not for EC2.

I am familiar with Azure servers and I find them more expensive than EC2. I find them quite difficult to use and they are not as scalable as AWS. They are not even that robust. I don't like Azure that much. The setup is also confusing.

The initial setup is actually very straightforward because if you follow the guidance given on AWS you can get everything done pretty quickly without any problems. The only way it gets difficult is when you try to configure things your own way. Of course, sometimes you need to do things your own way because you have certain requirements for that particular server. Then it could get complex.

It depends, again, on the server. If it's a Windows server it is very easy, like on the fly. If it is Linux, you might find it difficult to install some AM-AWS services. So that configuration may be tough. But if you're using the basic, it's pretty easy. 

But then you need to know what each of the instances are. You need to know what you're using it for and how these instance sites apply to your organization. You need an understanding of the basic information about AWS before you can just configure it. It's not like every person can just come in and configure it. It's easy to configure, but then it may not be what you need it for.

It is project dependent. Sometimes we follow the basic strategies. Sometimes we have to consider it based on the particular project which we're working on at the time.

We usually configure it ourselves in-house.

I think Amazon EC2 has fair pricing. I actually think the pricing is manageable. I have Free Tiers, as well. You can get on the Free Tier pricing and they just charge you for data storage.

My advice to anyone considering this is that they need to evaluate if it's necessary to have EC2, or if it is cheaper to run something in-house. It's very important because you don't want to throw money at cloud service providers if you can do it yourself. But the good thing is that cloud service providers take care of all the infrastructure and everything so you don't have to worry about that. It's nice to also have someone else accountable for your every structure rather than employing so many people at your job to do the work. That's the only good side about it. It is easy to learn Azure and all those GCP products.

On a scale of one to ten I would give Amazon EC2 an 8. 

I definitely would not give it a 10. It's not the best of the best because we still have issues with downtime. We still have issues with the cost of storage, with all these different instance styles, and how much it costs. They cost an arm and a leg the higher you go. Sometimes performance is an issue because of the kind of incidents that you have. That is why it cannot be a nine or a 10. But because CloudWatch is embedded in it, it lets you know when your system fails by sending you an email. It also has Trend Micro included. I think you may have to pay for it, am not sure. So it has benefits if you use it with other AWS services.

I use this solution to allow me to use work via a cloud computing platform.  This means I can access search information and features, such as Google Talk, that I would not normally be able to use.

My favorite feature of this solution is the flexibility of instance types, which allows for the cost to be tailored to the usage amount and type.

I would like to see improvement in the information available up-front for users around tailoring the package to their actual requirements. At present it can take time to work with the on demand instance until you are used to what features are right for the user.

I have been working with this solution for five years.

I have found this to be a stable solution during my time using it.

This is a scalable platform that can grow with the users requirements.

The initial setup of this solution is very quick and easy, and is all carried out online with guidance.

The pricing of this solution is variable.  There is an open-source variant that is accessible via the public cloud, and then tiers that range in price depending on the level and amount of usage that is required.

I would recommend that new users be very clear on what they require from this solution, and advise that they start with the 'user on demand' package until they know exactly what level of usage they need.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I'm using TCDs and OCDs, and these are the two high-performance systems.

We have our business applications running on EC2.

EC2 does have not many features. Normally, we do elastic load balancing, which is great.

The implementation is very easy. It's quick and easy to deploy.

It's quite stable. 

We find it easy to scale. 

We don't have any issues with the solution. Nothing is really missing in terms of features. 

I've been using the solution for many years now. 

The product is 100% stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution scales quite well, and it is easy to expand. 

It's very easy to add to what is already there. You just have to add memory and storage and restart the instance. 

We have more than 100 people using the solution.

While we do not have plans to increase usage at this time, we may do so in a year.

We've been happy with technical support. They are very helpful and responsive. 

Positive

The solution is straightforward to set up. It's not overly complex. We can deploy the solution in just ten to 15 minutes. It's very fast.

The maintenance is very easy. If we need help, we can always contact support for guidance. 

I was able to implement the solution myself. 

We've seen some ROI. It's saved us a lot of time on our side. 

The cost is moderate. It's not too high or too low. It's based on usage. While using AWS cloud ensures there are no hidden costs, if you use other clouds, there might be.

We did look into other options before choosing EC2. 

We're customers. 

I'm using a normal regular EC2. I'm not using containers.

On the cloud, we use both Amazon and Azure as our cloud. 

I'd recommend the solution as it is scalable, readily available, and offers good cost savings. People who know AWS have been very happy with the experience. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

I am using Amazon EC2 for computing applications in the cloud.

The most valuable features of Amazon EC2 are ease of use and the services offered.

Regional acceleration could improve. If I am hosting a website and I want the experience to be faster they should have this feature to allow for increased speeds.

I have been using Amazon EC2 for approximately eight years.

The solution has been stable in my usage. 

The scalability of Amazon EC2 is good.

I have not used another similar solution to Amazon EC2.

The initial setup of Amazon EC2 is not difficult. We find out the requirements that are needed to then implement the solution to meet those needs.

The price of Amazon EC2 could improve. The Google Cloud Platform is more cost-effective.

We pay for Amazon EC2 monthly.

I rate Amazon EC2 a nine out of ten.

We primarily use the solution as a server. 

The scalability is very good. 

It is very stable. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

We'd like to be able to scale without turning down the EC2 server. As of now, we have to turn it off in order to scale resources and then turn it on again. We'd like to upgrade and/or downgrade the server without shutting it down.

It is a little too expensive.

I've used the solution for a year or two. I haven't used it for that long. 

The solution is stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution is very scalable. I'd rate the scalability a ten out of ten.

I've never used the solution's technical support.

I'm also familiar with other cloud providers. 

The initial setup is not difficult at all. It is not overly complex. I'd rate the ease of setup eight out of ten.

I've found the pricing to be very expensive. I find it pricey compared to other options. 

We're customers and end-users.

I'd advise new users to practice sizing and try to keep their environment according to their needs. If you have an oversized server, it will cost too much money.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten overall. 

I've used it as a VBI. I've used it as a web application server. I'm also using it as an RGS server.

AWS has always been my go-to for labs, as I can't afford massive machines at home. Therefore, I go to AWS to test new services. It's a space and energy saver. 

The amount of bandwidth has been most valuable. 

It is stable and does not crash.

The product can scale.

Initially, setting up the product is easy.

They have to provide clarity on pricing. It's not transparent. I've never gone to production on AWS, as I've never been clear on what it would cost.

I'd like to test the sign-ons of AWS with Google or Microsoft.

I started using the solution since 2016.

It is very stable. I've never had a machine go down. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

I'd rate the scalability very high. It can scale to however big you want. 

I've never used technical support. I cannot speak to how helpful or responsive they would be. 

The initial setup is straightforward. It is not overly complex. 

We have witnessed an ROI while using the solution. 

The pricing is too complex. I can't understand it. If I have a service and want to launch in AWS, I need to know what it would cost to run it over the course of the year. I need to know the cost of bandwidth and storage. They need to lay out what they are charging and what clients can expect. 

I did not evaluate other options previously. 

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. 

I'd advise others to make sure they understand pricing before diving in.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten. I really don't have anything bad to say about its capabilities.