Likelihood to Recommend We recommend AWS Lightsail with Plesk Ubuntu Web Admin (free) edition for launching WordPress websites. Pricing starts with 3.5$ per month and they are providing 3 months free. In order to access advanced features of Plesk, consider upgrading to paid Plesk plans that starts with 13.50$ per month (10 websites supported). Up to 40% discount is available for the first year. Anyway, even the free Plesk Web Admin version is by itself self sufficient with free SSL.
Read full review It's well suited if:
The organization has large number of applications that needs to be deployed frequently. The organization is tied to the DevOps mindset. The organization has programs in different languages. The applications does not need EJB's support that servers like web logic provide. It's less suited if:
The applications needs security configuration within the same CloudFoundry instance. The organization, for whatever reason does not want developers to manage the instances. Read full review Pros Starting an instance and accessing it for testing purpose, demo or production deployment its always easy. All the things which are available over AWS are pretty well managed and easy to use. You might find everything you required for an product and other development over AWS. Its suitable for both either an enterprise or an startup Various resources and documentation are available in case you struck somewhere. Read full review Support for Orgs and Spaces that allow for managing users and deployables within a large organization. Easy deployment, deploying code is as simple as executing single line from CLI, thanks to build-packs. Solid and rich CLI, that allows for various operations on the instance. Isolated Virtual Machines called Droplets, that provide clean run time environment for the code. This used to be a problem with Weblogic and other application servers, where multiple applications are run on the same cluster and they share resources. SSH capability for the droplet (isolated VM's are called droplets), that allows for real time viewing of the App code while the application is running. Support for multiple languages, thanks to build-packs. Support for horizontal scaling, scaling an instance horizontally is a breeze. Support for configuring environment variable using the service bindings. Supports memory and disk space limit allocation for individual applications. Supports API's as well as workers (processes without endpoints) Supports blue-green deployment with minimal down time Read full review Cons If there is one thing I think AWS needs improvement on, it is the administration dashboard. It can be a nightmare to use especially when trying to access billing. This could be made better, honestly, as there should be a simplified way to access simple admin features. While AWS was fairly easy to integrate into our solutions, it is not as easy to use without some IT knowledge. The dashboards are complicated and designed for someone who is computer savvy. If you are just want to keep track of billing, for example, you may need to take a course or spend a few hours with someone being walked through the admin console. AWS does tend to be slow at times. If you do not have a fast internet connection, it can take time to access services that are hosted on AWS. This is not always the case but we have had clients complain about this if they are trying to access a service from multiple points (IP addresses). The only real fix we found was to make our files cache to another server and only keep current data accessible to clients. Read full review Does not support stateful containers and that would be a nice to have. Supports showing logs, but does not persist the logs anywhere. This makes relying on Cloud Foundry's logs very unreliable. The logs have to be persisted using other third party tools like Elk and Kibana. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We are almost entirely satisfied with the service. In order to move off it, we'd have to build for ourselves many of the services that AWS provides and the cost would be prohibitive. Although there are cost savings and security benefits to returning to the colo facility, we could never afford to do it, and we'd hate to give up the innovation and constant cycle of new features that AWS gives us.
Read full review Usability Our cloud platform architecture was designed in order to collect, analyze, and optimize modern networks, from AWS-powered computing, networking, storage, and more. So, we needed a reliable, scalable, and secure global computing infrastructure. Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing were key features in our evaluation and later on for scalability and high performance. We being a cybersecurity company, we needed to ensure that our cloud provider utilizes an end-to-end approach to secure and harden the infrastructure, including physical, operational, and software measures - which AWS had all in place.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Availability is very good, with the exception of occasional spectacular outages.
Read full review Performance AWS does not provide the raw performance that you can get by building your own custom infrastructure. However, it is often the case that the benefits of specialized, high-performance hardware do not necessarily outweigh the significant extra cost and risk. Performance as perceived by the user is very different from raw throughput.
Read full review Support Rating The customer support of Amazon Web Services are quick in their responses. I appreciate its entire team, which works amazingly, and provides professional support. AWS is a great tool, indeed, to provide customers a suitable way to immediately search for their compatible software's and also to guide them in a good direction. Moreover, this product is a good suggestion for every type of company because of its affordability and ease of use.
Read full review Implementation Rating The API's were very well documented and was Janova's main point of entry into the services.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Amazon Web Services is well suited when we have a huge amount of data to store, process, manipulate and get meaningful information out of. It is also suitable when we need very fast data retrieval from the database. They provide a superior product at a fair price which allows us to further our goals and push the limits of what we are capable of as a team / company.
Read full review While Docker shines in providing support for volumes and stateful instances, Cloud foundry shines in providing support for deploying stateless services.
Heroku shines in integrating with Git and using commits to git as hooks to trigger deployments right from the command line. But it does not provide on-premise solution that Cloud foundry provides.
Read full review Return on Investment AWS has lowered our employee cost, because you don't have to hire Network/Server Admins to manage infrastructure. Increased productivity by incorporating Continuous Integration with AWS and our development life cycle. Increased customer confidence by being able to provide HIPAA level security in our development and production environments Read full review Positive impact, since it simplifies the deployment time by a huge margin. Without cloud foundry, deploying a code needs coordination with infrastructure teams, while with cloud foundry, its a simple one line command. This reduces the deployment time from at least few hours to few minutes. Faster deployments promote faster dev cycle iterations. Code maintenance such as upgrading a Node or Java version is as simple as updating the build-pack. Without cloud foundry, using web logic, the specific version only supports a specific version of Java. So updating the version involves upgrading the version of web logic that needs to involve few teams. So without cloud foundry, it takes at least few days, with cloud foundry, its a matter of few mins. Overall, happier Developers and thats harder to quantify. Read full review ScreenShots