Amazon Web Services vs Zoho Creator

• AWS constantly innovates and iterates, announcing new features several times per year. Earlier this year, for example, they introduced provisioned IOPS for EBS, suddenly providing us with an inexpensive solution to a performance quandary we'd been facing.
• AWS has provided us with access to the product owners and architects of the products we use most. In turn, those resources provided us with visibility into the product road maps. This enabled us to improve our long-term infrastructure planning, and avoid expensive features that we'd get for free later in the year.
• AWS peremptorily lowers costs a couple of times per year. This has helped us keep our bill reasonable even as we consume more and more of the AWS services. We periodically compare the cost of AWS to the cost of moving into our colo, and every year the colo looks less and less attractive.

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• Workflow efficiencies: Automated emails triggered by a user response has saved our College a huge amount of time and our users are very impressed about confirmation emails and the immediacy of our 'replies'.
• Scheduled csv report exports which are then incorporated into our network database, easily.
• The ability to develop an app which meets the specific needs of any organisation is the clincher. We have spent far too much money on 'off the shelf' IT 'solutions' which always lack the capacity to be adjusted. Creator, true to it's name, enables us to do (nearly) anything that we want to do. The scripting language is intuitive and is easy to learn. (I'm 62 yo and the last time that I wrote script was over 40 years ago - I was a Maths teacher in the interim )

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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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• Programmatic manipulations of large databases often run into usage limits for Deluge Statements
• Limited GUI customizations but they are working on that
• It's often hard to identify where some code is generating a bug
• The Zoho team is constantly updating the platform capabilities: this may cause instability in current applications

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• We have reduced our S3 operating costs by 70% migrating to S3-IA.
• We save an average of 50% by bidding of spot instances and high capacity hours.
• It has allowed us to automate a large amount of our workload.

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• Increased employee efficiency
• Reduction of redundant inventory items
• Better project management

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