Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) vs. Citrix Profile Management (discontinued)

I think nowadays, Amazon EC2 is best-suited for most app development and deployment use cases, especially if your resource requirements are not fixed over a long period of time. The flexibility provided by the on-demand pricing and rescaling option makes Amazon EC2 a great service, especially if your tech stack already runs on AWS. On the other hand, I think Amazon EC2 is not the best option if your tech infrastructure runs on another public cloud.

I used Citrix in several ways and for several needs around several companies around the world. Not only tech companies but also flower companies were we migrated from on-premises ERP to cloud ERP. I think, based on my experience that if you have not so powerful computers and hardware it's nice to run Citrix remote desktop perhaps with a cloud app ERP on it but the internet connection has to stay always reliable and stable, better if you have 2 or more internet connections balanced each other with Peplink load balancing solution. A weak point is the internet connection. As for me, I don't like using Citrix solutions just to open a SharePoint folder or even a Jira.. total a waste of time.

Incentivized

• A great variety of choices in Amazon Machine Image (AMI) types. Users can select a more basic type to run generic workloads, but also have the choice to pick an AMI pre-installed with specific services in the AWS Marketplace.
• The range of instance types can support the usage from a student's exploration (inexpensive general-purpose nano instances) to an enterprise's most intense workloads (memory or storage-optimized instances with terabytes of memory and ultra-fast network connection).
• The pricing options, from regular instances, reserved instances to spot instances allow users to get the job done and make smart choices about how much they want to pay and when they want to pay.

Incentivized

• Easy to manage user access.
• Can watch server usage.
• Can manage end user profiles.

Incentivized

• This service is a bit difficult to consume. New users need a big learning curve to use this service effectively.
• UI for EC2 service is a little complex and at many places, it misses detailed explanation.
• Sometimes it takes too long to create images of EC2 instances. This keeps your EC2 up for that extra time. When instances are heavy, it penalizes a lot of money.

Incentivized

• Since UPM manages Microsoft roaming profiles you still face profile size challenges. You can use the exclude feature but it can be a bit limiting.
• Because of size concerns this may not be the best choice for international deployments if you intend to roam settings across multiple environments.
• Troubleshooting UPM can be a bit difficult at times. There are some built in logging features but those are best reviewed by Citrix.

Incentivized

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) allows various ways of gaining incidents, such as slow growth, money, and the reserved ones, mostly depend entirely on the necessity, because it makes highly intelligent choices possible at these times, which enable considerable cost savings whilst addressing the situation as best I like.

Incentivized

AWS's support is good overall. Not outstanding, but better than average. We have had very little reason to engage with AWS support but in our limited experience, the staff has been knowledgeable, timely and helpful. The only negative is actually initiating a service request can be a bit of a pain.

Incentivized

Azure VM and Google Compute Engine are alternatives to EC2. AWS EC2 is most matures and advanced of the 3. All these provide easy-to-deploy and automatically configured third-party applications, including single virtual machine or multiple virtual machine solutions.

Incentivized

Well, I really did not select it, but generally, as those products and solutions are very expensive and purchased on a corporative level, I used them as a user or a system IT manager... Citrix has almost no competitors that we can call like that really... it's the de-facto standard nowadays but I feel like that sense of supremacy and overall superiority threw Citrix company into a dark tunnel of blindness and missing opportunities conditions of leveraging the product to the next level and taking the opportunity to innovate and do more with less. Just take into consideration the MB heaviness of the Citrix Profile Management installer... it grows years after years... many MB and... the same solution and option... what a shame!

Incentivized

• AWS has had a very positive return on investment for every client we have that uses it. They are saving money in the long run.
• AWS includes the underlying operating system licenses with their EC2 instances so no longer do we have to navigate through Microsoft licensing headache.
• EC2 allows us to easily create a golden image of servers and store them as AMIs. This makes spinning up new servers that need a particular set of software in the future extremely easy and cost-effective.

Incentivized

• CPM is a must to manage Citrix user.

Incentivized