Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

If you're a small-to-medium sized company seeking to scale and continuing to grow, EC2 is a good choice for your company. Using EC2 allows for the ease of integration with other AWS products as well. If you're just starting out and looking for less complicated setup and cheaper options, EC2 might not be the best choice for you.

Well suited when we do not have space and resources to maintain and have in house servers. Less appropriate when someone needs instances just with high memory or CPU only. In this scenario it is a bit expensive compared to having in-house instance.

If you have data to process then this cost effective solution is the way to go for sure. It's a solid powered work engine and can handle anything you throw at it(depending on the instance.) Plus, its on-demand characteristic saves you a lot of money, in terms of not only on-demand usage, but also avoids hardware costs, or rather, idle hardware costs.

If your company or your clients have infrastructure restrictions (or a need for full control), or if your deployment contains many nodes to consider, EC2 could probably not be the best option. But if virtualization is an alternative, or you hear good comments among your managers about IaaS or PaaS, then AWS EC2 is the way to go. And for start-ups it is definitely the best alternative.

When you need total control of your server as if it were a black box in your office, EC2 works great. You can set it up however you need and know it will be reliable as long as your work is reliable. If you are just needing a web host and aren't incredibly server saavy, then you may be better suited looking elsewhere

It's good to use low end EC2, which cost a few cents an hour for those who are testers (who just need to evaluate it).
Blogs and Personal website can be hosted at a very cheap cost (approx. $20) and in a way that's more secure than any other cloud providers. And for high performance EC2, go for Reserved Instances which is more affordable than unreserved instances

EC2 is elastic infrastructure. Your org does not have to invest in in-house data centers and staff to manage the hardware. AWS EC2 provides elastic cloud environment to run lot of this. Price is reasonable and AWS has lot of h/w s/w design pattern to design a reliable software application and run it in a resilient environment.

I've found that while EC2 and AWS might mean initially more setup than purchasing compute resources through a reseller it makes life much easier down the line as you have more control over your instances and other resources. This also ends up that it will cost more dev time up front but less money in comparison.

It's also possible to fine-tune your AWS spending whereas I've found this difficult with AWS resellers in the past.

It's great when you need a web site or service up and running immediately with specific settings and software. It's great when you need to scale it within minutes and only pay for the time that the extra power is used. It's not so great when you want to learn how everything works and the documentation is difficult to find or worded differently or out dated because things seem to change every year or two on AWS but the documentation lags a little behind.

It is least appropriate where you don't have the technical expertise to manage your own servers. And it's not very well suited for someone who isn't willing to monitor and manage the costs. It's perfect for development firms and smaller agencies that provide managed hosting because the infrastructure is reliable and safe and it's much easier to manage the costs when you can deploy and scale at will.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is best suited for anyone needing a computer resource. It truly can be used for any computer resource needs you may have.

The surrounding infrastructure pieces, like load balancers, route53, etc, make EC2 amazing.

For when you don't need a full computer, using ECS or EKS can be an alternate, container-based solution.

EC2 is really useful in distributed architectures applications. It solves many business problems and is easy to manage without us having to worry about any physical server. EC2 can be tricky provided the options it gives w/r/t sizing, and sometimes it doesn't work with smaller instances, but bigger instances are costly so organizations can't afford bigger instances

We are currently exploring alternative hosts - likely a direct partnership - collocated or dedicated. We like the predictability of a monthly fee, a service partner to call in case of crisis, and pushing the resource scaling responsibility back to a partner who is eager to scale down but contractually obligated to scale perfectly.

Running your whole infrastructure on EC2 instances could be very expensive. For most companies, it would be a great way to host a web server, dabble with offsite high availability for critical servers or EC2 could work as a fantastic extension to a company's DMZ.

EC2 is well suited for anyone that is looking to move their servers to the cloud, save money in the process, and future-proof their servers. EC2 even allows for existing VMs from an on-premise or hosted environment to be exported and imported into EC2. Also, AWS makes licensing the operating system super easy.

It is a great infrastructure to work with if you are architecting a product. Lots of tools to use and options within AWS that integrate easily with EC2. If you are simply looking to launch virtual machines, make sure you are looking at Reserved Instances and not On Demand instances.

AWS EC2 is applicable to most any application workload deployment scenario that needs a public cloud, including GovCloud. Even some on-site, on-prem scenarios can leverage AWS Snowball Edge with EC2 on-prem compute to meet some needs. Likewise Lightsail provides options for app specific scenarios, and EKS containers, along with Lambda meet need for serverless/FaaS/PaaS. Key is knowing the various EC2 options from dedicated bare metal to VM to container to even Snowball Edge/SBE. Likewise knowing the various instance options for deployment along with deciding to use on-demand, spot or reserved instances.

EC2 really shines when you have the necessity for quick changes and modifications. The tools available and the different options given to the users make it a snap (as long as you understand Amazon's terminology and topology) to make these needed changes. On that note, Amazon's EC2 platform in my belief shouldn't be used for one-and-done style hosting or computing. If one had many little sites or spaces needed to store data, EC2 would be great. For one website or one app, I don't think EC2 would be worth the knowledge and financial.

EC2 is suited for cloud native applications where you want to run your workloads. If you have a Linux or Windows application EC2 will likely suffice. You need to design your applications to run in a cloud environment as running a monolithic lift and shift type of application on EC2 will likely cause your application to break or incur unnecessary costs. EC2 is one of the oldest AWS services and is heavily supported and tested. It is up to you how you manage your servers to scale out or in. EC2 is just a box and you need to tell it what to do.

EC2 can get expensive if you don't need to run the system all the time. There are better options like Lambda and serverless technologies that may end up being cheaper and easier to deploy.

AWS is well suited for most uses. Even if you have a preference for specific vendor hardware, there are often virtual appliances offered within AWS. BigIP F5 load balancers for example. If you need to be up and running relatively quickly, including the ability to quickly make changes to your environment, AWS is great. It's also great in that you can grow into it and its many many services. However, it is not cheap by any means.

Elastic workloads, batch processing jobs, jobs that require specific optimization (CPU, Memory, Storage, etc.).

If you need full configuration control over the servers that your applications run on, then EC2 is well-suited for your use-case. It essentially grants you ownership of your choice of server without the significant overhead that accompanies physical ownership. However, if you're just looking to host a standard application like MySQL or Elasticsearch, I would recommend checking whether or not AWS offers that application as a hosted service. Using hosted services will reduce the amount of time you need to spend configuring and maintaining your servers.

Due to the price, it is most cost effective for scenarios where you do not need constant processing, because if you work out the math it is far cheaper to go with a bare metal solution. With that said, if you require some flex hosts for testing for a few hours or days, then the solution can't be beat.

It is very well suited if:

• You are tied in with rest of AWS ecosystem.
• For running Databases not offered through RDS especially considering their Snapshot backup service.
• You want to have the ability to customize the instance to suit your needs.
• Need on-demand instances also called Spot instances for short spikes in usage.

Less appropriate if:

• Only needing a silo instance (because of cost)
• Need OS/hardware level customizations.

EC2 instances is suitable for all lightweight, stateless cloud ready applications. Applications whose workloads have significant volume peaks and valleys. Cross region communication is not available natively.
EC2 instances are definitely not suitable for heavyweight, stateful applications that require storage of immutable data in its local instance. Not suitable if instance types need to vary significantly.