Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) vs. F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Users can launch instances with a variety of OSs, load them with custom application environments, manage network access permissions, and run images on multiple systems.
$0.01
per IP address with a running instance per hour on a pro rata basis
F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
F5 Distributed Cloud WAF leverages F5's Advanced WAF technology, delivering WAF-as-a-Service and combining signature- and behavior-based protection for web applications. It acts as an intermediate proxy to inspect application requests and responses to block and mitigate a broad spectrum of risks stemming from the OW ASP Top 10, persistent and coordinated threat campaigns, bots, and layer 7 DoS.N/A
Pricing
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)
Editions & Modules
Data Transfer
$0.00 - $0.09
per GB
On-Demand
$0.0042 - $6.528
per Hour
EBS-Optimized Instances
$0.005
per IP address with a running instance per hour on a pro rata basis
Carrier IP Addresses
$0.005 - $0.10
T4g Instances
$0.04
per vCPU-Hour Linux, RHEL, & SLES
T2, T3 Instances
$0.05 ($0.096)
per vCPU-Hour Linux, RHEL, & SLES (Windows)
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
9.1
18 Ratings
11% above category average
F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)
-
Ratings
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime8.517 Ratings00 Ratings
Dynamic scaling9.317 Ratings00 Ratings
Elastic load balancing9.217 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-configured templates9.517 Ratings00 Ratings
Monitoring tools8.117 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images9.817 Ratings00 Ratings
Operating system support9.617 Ratings00 Ratings
Security controls9.617 Ratings00 Ratings
Automation8.47 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)
Small Businesses
Akamai Cloud Computing
Akamai Cloud Computing
Score 9.0 out of 10
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.8 out of 10
Enterprises
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
Akamai App & API Protector
Akamai App & API Protector
Score 8.6 out of 10
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User Ratings
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(65 ratings)
8.9
(58 ratings)
Usability
8.5
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.5
(12 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
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.
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F5
So a lot of companies that have a digital side and they have a lot of applications in the cloud, this is one of those areas that it can protect the net so it can lock 'em down, it'll build a baseline so you understand what that application's doing. So if it sees something not normal, it'll get protected against that.
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Pros
Amazon AWS
  • 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.
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F5
  • Layer seven attacks are becoming far more common. Traditionally it was always layered three, layer four, where you get an additional firewall, but with the application layer attacks become more frequent, more popular, et cetera. So having the web application firewall protecting us, and then with the recent Log4j, that's the most recent use case when it gave us that instant level of protection whilst we remediated the Log4j that we had that and the F5 Distributed Cloud WAF was protecting us.
  • I have a great relationship with the account manager, my account manager, and I think he drives the best price possible, um, for me, and I'm happy with that price.
  • F5 Distributed Cloud WAF is always innovating and evolving.
  • We run a very competitive proof value where we run numerous competitors against each other, and then we evaluate from that and then make the selection, and F5 Distributed Cloud WAF was the winner.
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Cons
Amazon AWS
  • 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.
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F5
  • So we just had some performance issues when it comes to routing. Because the web application firewall sits in front of our website, which is hosted on-site, we had some trouble with the VGP protocols between the two sites and it took us a while to figure it out. So that is probably one area where we could improve. Otherwise, when it comes to the WAF functionality itself, it's really good.
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Usability
Amazon AWS
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.
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F5
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Amazon AWS
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.
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F5
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
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.
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F5
Basically, Cloudflare is a more economical solution at the level of DNS balancing, easy to use with a few simple clicks and that has gained an advantage in the market, however, compared to F5, it falls short of the entire protection panorama that the solution provides since F5 does not It's just DNS that goes further and that's where it differentiates and stands out.
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Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • 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.
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F5
  • Accelerated time to value as it was a requirement for a workload being provisioned on that cloud
  • As an existing f5 customer, access to their solutions integrator (GridZero) made the sizing, licensing, purchases, and downloading of the software very quick and painless
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ScreenShots