Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud review for Machine Learning Developers
I use it for training machine learning models. I use the Deep Learning AMIs available to spin up Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances …
Starting at $0.01 per IP address with a running instance per hour on a pro rata basis
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What is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)?
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Users can launch instances with a variety of OSs, load them with custom application environments, manage network access permissions, and…
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Popular Features
- Pre-configured templates (17)9.595%
- Dynamic scaling (17)9.393%
- Elastic load balancing (17)9.292%
- Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime (17)8.686%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
Data Transfer
$0.00 - $0.09
Cloud
per GB
On-Demand
$0.0042 - $6.528
Cloud
per Hour
EBS-Optimized Instances
$0.005
Cloud
per IP address with a running instance per hour on a pro rata basis
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Demos
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Training @ VICTORYSOST
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Product Details
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- Tech Details
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What is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)?
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Users can launch instances with a variety of OSs, load them with custom application environments, manage network access permissions, and run images on multiple systems.
Key Features
Bare metal instances
Amazon EC2 Fleet (fleet management)
Pause and resume instances
GPU compute instances
GPU graphics instances
High I/O instances
Dense HDD storage instances
Optimized CPU configurations
Flexible storage options
Pay-as-you-go pricing
Place instances in multiple locations
Elastic IP addresses
Auto-scale capacity up or down
HPC clusters
Elastic Fabric Adapter
Available on AWS PrivateLink
Amazon Time Sync Service
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Users can launch instances with a variety of OSs, load them with custom application environments, manage network access permissions, and run images on multiple systems.
Reviewers rate Pre-defined machine images highest, with a score of 9.8.
The most common users of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Deep Learning AMIs.
- Ubuntu Instances.
- Data Security by hiding Public IPs.
- Support for VPN for data security.
- Always ON, never slows down.
- Documentation
- Tutorials for beginners.
- Simplifying Dashboard.
May 11, 2023
EC2 - All in one solution
- its pay-as-you-go pricing approach
- effectively provide and manage compute resources
- adjust resource allocation
- nothing as such but some more cross functional policies can be added
April 15, 2022
Great cloud service for flexible compute workloads
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- On-demand usage and pricing
- Scale CPU, memory, and disk up or down easily
- Firewall and security features
- Scale-up CPU and memory separately
- Manage SSH keys via web console
- Faster start and stop times
- Scalability.
- Reliability.
- High Availability.
- Cost per hour.
- Shared memory for multiple instances.
November 24, 2021
EC2 is expensive - expect cost overruns - but works as advertised
- Easy to use.
- Integrates with other AWS services well.
- Unstable for EC2 instances of small size.
- Expensive compared to Linode, Digital Ocean.
- Hidden charges such as network fees.
November 19, 2021
Highly Recommend AWS's EC2 Instances
- Saves Money
- Creates Efficiencies
- Easy to Setup
- Easy to Manage
- Minor improvements to the EC2 User Interface
- Dashboard its nice.
- The product is constantly evolving both in terms of features and user-friendliness.
- Sales is present but not pushy.
- Hard to get used to and often need to search for items instead of them being visible.
- More extensive video library instead of written documentation
- Identifying the cost of the resources is not straight forward.
- EC2 can be used for multiple purposes.
- EC2 can be used for installing Web Application and Middle application
- EC2 can be used for migrating the data from one source to another source
- EC2 can be used for data mining, integration and transformation purposes
- EC2 provides scale up and scale down capability by managing instance type
- EC2 would require often to upgrade with the security patches which cause a burden to manage. Amazon releases new AMI (Amazon Machine Images) which has latest patches frequently. Customer has to upgrade the EC2 with the latest AMI. This is not simple work but could be manageable using automatic scripts. However, it is tedious task.
April 28, 2021
EC2 for Startups
- Hosting and deployment.
- High performance computing.
- Development and test environments.
- UI is little complicated.
- Limited information for the resources managed by Amazon EC2.
- Networking is not as flexible as other providers.
November 25, 2019
The best and most scalable cloud infrastructure in the entire world!
- elastic compute
- cloud server creation
- infinite scalability
- ability to secure and deploy servers on the run
- cloud imaging and machine images
- user interface
- documentation
- server sizes and regions
November 13, 2019
My wonderful EC2 Experience
- Automatic scaling of microservices
- Fast CPUs
- Selectable memory size
- Unknown limits of managed services
- Sharing of resources... Could have noisy-neighbors
- Uncontrollable downtimes
October 31, 2019
Maximum flexibility. Competitive pricing. Great support.
- A great variety of choices in Amazon Machine Image (AMI) types. Users can select a more basic type to run generic workloads, but also have the choice to pick an AMI pre-installed with specific services in the AWS Marketplace.
- The range of instance types can support the usage from a student's exploration (inexpensive general-purpose nano instances) to an enterprise's most intense workloads (memory or storage-optimized instances with terabytes of memory and ultra-fast network connection).
- The pricing options, from regular instances, reserved instances to spot instances allow users to get the job done and make smart choices about how much they want to pay and when they want to pay.
- The choices on AMIs, instance types and additional configuration can be overwhelming for any non-DevOps person.
- The pricing information should be more clear (than only providing the hourly cost) when launching the instance. AWS DynamoDB gives an estimated monthly cost when creating tables, and I would love to see similar cost estimation showing on EC2 instances individually, as not all developers gets access to the actual bills.
- The term for reserving instances are at least 12 months. With instance types changing so fast and better instances coming out every other day, it's really hard to commit to an existing instance type for 1 or more years at a time.
October 25, 2019
EC2 - Excellent Cloud Computing Service
- 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.
- This service is a bit difficult to consume. New users need a big learning curve to use this service effectively.
- UI for EC2 service is a little complex and at many places, it misses detailed explanation.
- Sometimes it takes too long to create images of EC2 instances. This keeps your EC2 up for that extra time. When instances are heavy, it penalizes a lot of money.
October 21, 2019
The de facto standard cloud VM host
- Low-impact virtual servers. If you need a server that consumes very little resources/disk space, EC2 is extremely economical.
- Testing. Spinning up an EC2 virtual machine to test applications, services, etc is invaluable.
- Dealing with small businesses, the recurring cost of a high-performance EC2 instance (or one requiring a ton of S3 storage) might be more than an on-premise server for the same task.
- Even with the AWS cost calculator, it can be difficult to accurately estimate the recurring cost of EC2 instances.
October 21, 2019
EC2 is my First choice for cloud
- Auto scaling
- Security
- On demand
- I wish amazon come up with a GUI interface for EC2's
October 18, 2019
Amazon EC2 - Best Cloud Hosting Provider on the market
- Very cost effective
- Easily scalable. Can increase or decrease servers in minutes.
- Very easy to use. Amazing admin console giving you full control of your servers.
- You have the option to do 1 or 3 year reserved instances, but nothing in between.
- AWS CLI (command line interface) can be tricky to learn and use.
- There are a very large amount of services and configuration options, it's sometimes hard to keep track and understand them all.
- It's cost-effective because you pay for only what you use, this is imperative in not-for-profit higher ed, and there are also no long term commitments or upfront fees. This is only one of the pricing options available (the one that best serves us) so there is flexibility.
- Which is my next point, the flexibility of EC2 is what sets is apart from anything else. It is designed to not let the technology get in the way of your ideas and work.
- It is VERY quick and easy to get up and running. Someone brand new to EC2 could have this up and running very fast.
- Performance..EC2 is somewhat slow by comparison and is getting worse as faster processors and hard drives come in the to market.
- Reserved instances.. while they eliminate the price-gap, they do nothing about the performance gap.
- Platform Specific Language that is of any AWS product. The more you need to do with your system and the further you go "inside", the further you go from traditionally recognized languages and their operations. There is a learning curve and it's oftentimes necessary to have support.
- It is possible to create automated backup schedules so your servers will be backed up with less tweaking and work from employees. It is also super quick to restore those backups if necessary. Finally, they back up the server in an efficient manner so you don't have redundant sized backups, but rather just backups of the files changed over the period of time you make the backups.
- The ability to launch instances of any size and then change the size later is incredibly useful and has saved us both time and money in multiple instances. For example, we launched a large instance to make sure we had enough power for an application we launched and later we realized it didn't need as much power so we just turned the instance off and changed the instance type and turned it back on and started saving money!
- The ability to create snapshots of instances is fantastic. We have had some issues launching new instances from snapshots and being unable to access the instance for some reason. It wasn't ever fully resolved but we found our own workarounds.
- It provides you with static IP addresses.
- Auto-scaling feature.
- Easy to configure and set up your instance.
- You can always change the type of your instances (allocation of more or less CPU/memory for your instance).
- Securely log in to your environment with PEM files.
- I think that AWS Console should have a terminal screen through which you can access your EC2 instances easily in the browser.
- Sometimes you cannot have any clue why the instance is auto-scaled, when you may be pretty sure that there is no high traffic in that particular time.
- The ;earning curve is a bit high in order to make your instances fully configured, and the community is still weak.
July 07, 2019
A Great Choice
- Quick setup: Once you understand the process, the AWS console makes standing up an EC2 instance a breeze.
- Config options: there are plenty of different types of EC2 instances, all geared for specific use cases.
- Documented processes: Amazon White papers are such a great resource when questions arise.
- Default limit: In an EC2 Instance the default limit is 20 per region, you must request for more per region.
- User knowledge: since it as a new technology, getting our admins trained quickly and efficiently has slowed our efforts.
- Cost of support: if you need to engage AWS support the cost can hurt.
June 21, 2019
EC2: Game changer
- Quick and easy way to deploy resources based on business needs.
- Vast array of AMI to select based on project requirements.
- Allows for quick access control and scalability based on storage and compute needs.
- Pricing for resources can be expanded on more.
- IP allocation for virtual machines should be sticky even though they are not static.
- AMI pricing should be more under control.
April 29, 2019
EC2 for scalable web apps
- The ability to expand resources for your cloud deployment depending on demand makes it highly appealing.
- The cloud hosting offers excellent backup capabilities so reverting to an earlier version is a breeze.
- Cloud infrastructure avoids the need for us to maintain hardware resources locally. Security and software patching is all handled remotely.
- The whole process of configuration and spinning up instances requires thorough technical knowledge. The learning curve for it seems a bit daunting.
- The training documentation and support is a bit lacking. We tried using Lambda expressions for program flow execution and did not find great resources on that topic.
April 08, 2019
EC2- Computing on demand
- Customizable computing is here to stay with EC2. From a minimal 2-core machine for a minimal microservice to the biggest 16-core Xeon with Nvidia Quadros for a machine-learning model, compute power can be immediately up or downsized to your current need at any given moment.
- Cost savings with EC2 is incredible. By putting computer hardware in a communal bidding system, you minimize your cost per server with every other company who also wants those resources. If you have time-independent processes that you need to process, you can even bid on leftover server contracts that have gone unfilled for pennies on the dollar.
- EC2 storage options are lengthy, with EBS volumes, ephemeral storage, and multiple options to customize throughput and storage cost for each one.
- 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.
February 22, 2019
Fully featured cloud containers
- Easy to start and stop
- Well priced
- Completely customizable
- Difficulty identifying exactly what type of instance you want/need
- Networking can be confusing
- Poor UI
January 02, 2019
AWS EC2: Best IaaS Solution on the Market
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Provides flexibility to optimize a lot of workloads.
- Provides clear and transparent pricing.
- With enhanced networking, the latest generations provide high bandwidth and low jitter throughput between tiers.
- I can’t think of any