Amazon Web Services vs PowerApps

• AWS (Amazon Web Services) is not the easiest virtual service to set up but once you get the hang of it, it's fairly easy to install new instances (servers) and stop them. This is good for multiple reasons e.g we run multiple tests and live production servers for our different services. When we are done with one we can easily turn it off. The cost of the specifications on our virtual servers is only a fraction of the cost of what we would get locally or even on most traditional web services companies.
• Amazon Web Services can be relatively cost efficient depending on where you are coming from. For our smaller organization, we felt the cost was worth it as other alternatives were not as affordable. The good thing with AWS is you only pay for what you use. If you want S3 (Simple Storage Service), you can pay for that. If you want to run a compute engine, EC2 can be paid for. At the end of the month, you get one bill based on your usage.
• Because of our size as a company, AWS was easier to deploy compared to local dedicated solutions. All we had to do was take our development team through a simple 2-day course to get them on board. The ease of deployment means that we do not have to hire a specialist to deploy servers for us.

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• Easy to create simple apps based on data from a wide variety of sources.
• Branding and customization and is simple and powerful.
• Works well for people with an excel background.

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• Occasionally, we disagree with their roadmap priorities. For example, we really needed Content-Based Routing added to ELB to support our multitenant implementation. The AWS architects agreed that it was a mainstream, valuable request and hinted that they were trying to get it onto the roadmap, but 15 months later there's still no sign of it. I'm sure they have their reasons, but it's a strange and annoying hole in an otherwise invaluable service.
• AWS has had well-publicized outages that have broken the promise of true zone (datacenter) isolation. This was supposed to have been impossible - if you had instances running in two zones within a region, you thought had a solid survivability story. We were forced to react by building out additional redundancy that increased costs beyond our original design estimates. AWS claims to have resolved the problem, but we haven't been confident enough to spin down the extra servers yet.
• There are annoying resource limits, presumably in place to prevent hackers from allocating huge numbers of resources on a compromised account. The problem is that raising the resource limits requires manual action to be taken, and can have a severe impact on production software if your ops team isn't meticulous in checking the limits. As of the last time I checked, these limits weren't available via API, making it impossible to create alarms whenever we get close to exceeding our resource limits.
• AWS is relatively infamous for their poor communications during outages. Their status page will occasionally go without an update for 45 minutes, while half your customers are dead in the water. This is - obviously - infuriating.

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• I feel that although it is possible to adapt the tablet view to desktop it can be cumbersome and the screen ratio is not right. There should be an option for making a desktop or browser based application specifically; or at least more screen ratio choices.
• "PowerApps Desktop" is only available via windows store; for some enterprise users(specifically LTSB users) that makes it unavailable as windows store cannot be used with this version of Windows. A stand alone download or an explanation in the documentation would be nice to have.
• I have spent a ton of time changing the formating over to the standard that I am using throughout the application on each data card or places where copy paste isn't an option. A format painter or a place to provide typical formating options such as font type and color would be a HUGE time saver for those of us trying to brand our applications.

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• Dynamic scaling has allowed us to match cost to revenue producing traffic

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• I am still developing my application but assuming everything works the way I have laid it out then PowerApps will help us to turn a 10yo marcro-powered Excel workbook with mostly static work-flows into a streamlined and less mistake-prone workflow while utilizing a single database.
• The application will allow us to access dynamic project information in the field via tablet. Previously this could only be done via phone call or email.

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