Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) vs VMware ESXi

• EC2 has wide variety of machine configurations. If the intended solutions are memory heavy, CPU heavy, GPU heavy or IO heavy, EC2 will provide proper machine configurations as per the requirements.
• EC2 has lot of Machine Images to setup OS and required softwares. It also allows you to create the image of your own disk. This facilitates user to stop the EC2 instance without loosing the work. It helps to reduce the bill. The image can be attached again to EC2 to start from the same place from where it was left.
• Amazon allows different way to obtain instances like on-demand, spot and reserved. Depending upon the need, one can take wise decision to save cost and address the situation in the best possible way.

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• ESXi makes management of hosted machines easy. Everything is in one place. If you have a vCenter (which costs extra) to manage all your ESXi hosts, then everything is truly in one place and there is no need to hop around from management tool to management tool. Al the virtual machines' hardware settings, OS information, storage volume information, backup information, even a remote console just like a KVM ... all of it is in one place.
• ESXi balances workloads well when using vCenter. Behind the scenes, the vCenter allows an ESXi host to "talk to" other ESXi hosts and when one VM has resources usage that gets past a certain threshold, it can move virtual machines around to balance workloads, even while the machines are running and service users. It's completely invisible to the users, who don't experience latency or any kind of interruptions when their VM is being moved.

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• The UI of AWS is quite hard to familiarize with, along with the infrastructure setup. It's a conglomeration of hundreds of acronyms specific to AWS that must be understood including their minutiae to effectively run a cloud deployment. While AWS' documentation is extensive, their beginner-focused guides could use work.
• Instances become incredibly hard to manage after a critical mass, forcing companies to create their own management applications to fill the void that AWS leaves. Along with this, AWS' SDKs can be very poorly documented making this task exponentially more difficult.
• If you lose your SSH key that is released with the creation of the instance, you lose complete access to the server. While I understand the reasoning behind this decision, MFA recovery would be a nice touch.

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• I would love for some of the features only available within the upper tiers of ESXi licensing to be available for Standard licensing purchases. There is a vast difference between free, standard, enterprise plus licensing.
• The learning curve might be an issue for some users, but can be overcome with the vast amount of resources available. You might have to train to find all of the resources as well.

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• Instance procurement time has become negligible with EC2. Any developer can provision an instance very quickly and companies can move towards automation of CI/CD pipelines and auto provisioning of EC2s.
• Companies do not have to spend money in managing infrastructures, data centers, staff to manage these, networking, connectivity etc. All this will be taken care by AWS and EC2 can be used to run your enterprise softwares and custom applications.
• If not correctly monitored EC2 prices can run up very quickly. So proper monitoring has to be in place in your organization. Non-prod and dev EC2 servers should be brought down in evening and night.

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• While using VMware ESXI for our virtual infrastructure hosts, we have had a little downtime, and the VMware ESXI system has caused none of the downtimes.
• The VMware ESXi hosts have also been able to recover well when there have been unexpected power failures to the kit. This has been very valuable as in the past, we have lost servers when this has happened.

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