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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• Virtualization allows us to create machines that handle specific tasks rather than a bare metal OS that uses the entire hardware; on bare metal, an admin has to use the machine to handle multiple tasks which is confusing to administrate.
• VMware is fantastic at migrating systems between hosts. This is important to distribute load and for consideration in case of hardware failure.
• VMware makes automation a snap, we currently use puppet & kickstart for our automation software. Virtualization allows us to be agile in creating systems and destroying them. Before VMware we had to provision machines by hand which is costly in labor costs.
• VMware has some exciting verticals that integrate well with its hypervisor, VSan comes to mind which helped us address our need for resiliency in case of a hardware fault.

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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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• They continue to improve on moving from Flash to HTML 5 based management.
• I'd like to see more flexibility in how multi-site VCSA redundancy can be deployed.
• I'd like to see some of the automation and orchestration tools become more affordable for the small to mid-sized business market. vRA/vRO/vCloud..

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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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• When speaking about ROI, it is excellent to think about all the hardware maintenance that you save.
• It also saves when you are getting an A.V. solution since some technologies need only to license the number of CPU cores.
• it helps to reduce the costs of backup since you can backup many severs within the same technology.

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