Hard to go wrong with AWS!
January 31, 2013
Hard to go wrong with AWS!
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Software Version
Several
Modules Used
- EC2
- Simple Email Service
- Route 53
- S3
Overall Satisfaction
- The development and administration tools work well, including a consistent API and adequate management console. In terms of business process, it provided an effective "escape valve" for new product development that would have been much more onerous to deploy if we had to provision physical hardware and arrange for associated IT resources.
- AWS has a record of occasional severe outages, which has a cascading effect on the large number of high-profile services that now run on its infrastructure. Despite the spectacular nature of these outages, it is unlikely that a self-managed data center would achieve significantly better uptime.
- It is also the case that AWS outages can be mitigated with effective use of multiple deployment 'zones' and regions. This is something that any mission-critical application should be doing anyway as part of disaster recovery preparations.
- It would be difficult to quantify the ROI exactly, but it virtually eliminates capital expenditures on hardware and at least halves the need for IT labor.
Product Usage
50 - Product development, IT
- It is used to host a set of custom services (built and deployed as Java web applications) to supplement a primary application that runs within the Salesforce platform.
Evaluation and Selection
I switched from purchasing machines, hauling them to the data center and installing them myself.
We also looked at Rackspace but was attracted to AWS by the breadth of services available at comparable cost and reliability.
Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Training
- Self-taught
It was relatively easy for a developer to learn how to use it for simple scenarios. Setting up more complex virtual infrastructure with multiple tiers, redundancy and failover is more of a challenge to to take on from scratch, but a number of companies offer support in the form of deployment templates and additional services.
Configuration
Once you get to the point of configuring your machines, there is not much difference between physical and virtual. You still need to maintain the operating system, configure networking, etc.
Support
No - Documentation combined with large amount of additional detail on the web is sufficient.
Usability
Reliability
Integration
- Salesforce
Integration is via a custom SOAP API. It was not difficult.
Vendor Relationship
We did not negotiate.