Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review 1) If you are gathering lots of data from many different points and transforming that data into something customized, and you need it secure yet accessible, this is a great option. 2) If you are looking for a platform and not just a service provider, this would be a great option. As a platform, there is a one-stop-shop feeling that gets you some better customer service and performance. But it also locks you into one provider, so don’t jump in if you feel like you’ll want a lot of flexibility. 3) Building or running VMware is really what this platform is all about. If you’re creating an app drawing from some complex data/sources, it’s an easier go with this tool than most others.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review It fills a niche that was needed before we as a company fully embraced the cloud with Azure. It was a great introduction to the cloud and there are some features I wish were more readily available with some of our Azure tools. Staying on top of your expenses is much harder without the transparency Hitachi provides. It allows the small team managing it to simplify cloud operations using prebuilt computing and storage templates. Very easy to monitor, manage and optimize cloud operations. Pre-Engineered, turnkey solutions with prebuilt services make it quick and easy to select the service needed for each app. With many different suppliers, we cater to many different connectors. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Their ability to offer a public cloud solution that feels like a private cloud solution is a great feature, but not one that is easily understood outside of someone using the tool. I think they need more training and marketing around what they can do for cloud-native development. I think they are lacking a solution to play in other playgrounds easily. Many of their offerings are better than what Azure provides, so I think there is room for them to leverage Azure size with customized, personalized features. They really need something big to set them apart from the larger players in this space. I think of Snowflake with their amazing pricing model and the “oops!” button that undoes serious accidental deletes. Something like that would grow the user base and make it a major player. Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Hitachi Enterprise Cloud is a pleasant surprise, offering better management and control of your cloud containers and VMware. It is a platform and contains all you need to get going, so there is great appeal in smaller companies and isolated divisions/departments in larger companies. If I were managing a small group with a specific endpoint I would no doubt choose a solution like this, but being a large corporation we tend to drive towards larger solutions with internal competencies to support those larger roll-outs.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review The positive pricing aspect has been with the rate card and compute pricing transparency, being better able to manage the budget. It is a small solution for us, so we are probably not realizing the potential savings we could get by rolling all our corporate cloud work into a single solution, but it is also good to keep multiple irons in the fire, so to speak. The implementation has done very well in a small, controlled atmosphere. So while the ROI may not have been as high as we’d like to see, the success of the project has made it valuable none the less. Read full review ScreenShots