Skip to main content
TrustRadius
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Overview

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…

Read more
Recent Reviews

EC2 for Startups

9 out of 10
April 28, 2021
Incentivized
EC2 is easy to get started with there are a lot of online resources for help. We use it to serve our online Django-based Rest and Graph …
Continue reading
Read all reviews

Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 9 features
  • Pre-configured templates (17)
    9.5
    95%
  • Dynamic scaling (17)
    9.3
    93%
  • Elastic load balancing (17)
    9.2
    92%
  • Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime (17)
    8.7
    87%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

View all pros & cons
Return to navigation

Pricing

View all 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
Return to navigation

Product Demos

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Training @ VICTORYSOST

YouTube
Return to navigation

Features

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

IaaS provides the basic building blocks for an IT infrastructure like servers, storage, and networking, in an on-demand model over the Internet

9.1
Avg 8.1
Return to navigation

Product Details

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 TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

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).
Return to navigation

Comparisons

View all alternatives
Return to navigation

Reviews and Ratings

(346)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 65)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I use it for training machine learning models. I use the Deep Learning AMIs available to spin up Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances and then use that to train large models.

I use the GPU-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances, as for training large models good GPUs with high memory are required. I connect the instance to the S3 bucket where I store that data.
  • 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.
It is good for training big models when getting access to GPU is not possible. If you've access to GPU, then training them on the computer makes more sense as it helps in reducing the cost.

Prefer it when you just can't manage on-premise machines as they require a lot of maintenance and get down quite often. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud takes off that burden from head, i.e. no worry of maintenance and is always ON. Also provide the functionality of scaling up when required.
Neel Shah | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use EC2 to rapidly and efficiently scale up or down as needed for our customers while still providing a secure and dependable environment. It enables us to swiftly supply new instances and adjust resource allocation as necessary.We also use EC2 to provide high-performance computing, process data, and do analytics.
  • 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
Good Scenario : EC2 is a wonderful option when you need to execute a lot of compute-intensive tasks, like producing videos or performing scientific calculations. It is the best option for applications that call for a lot of processing power due to its fast CPUs and potent GPUs.Bad Scenario : The best option for conducting lengthy tasks might not be EC2. Since EC2 instances are made to be quickly spun up and down, they might not be the greatest option for jobs that call for prolonged compute cycles.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Amazon EC2 to host our internal apps for data engineering. We self-manage our own Apache Airflow installation on an EC2 instance. Amazon EC2 gives us a way to provide the necessary computing infrastructure for our data integration pipelines. It's also very convenient to resize Amazon EC2 to handle our ever-increasing workloads due to larger volumes of data as our company's app usage grows exponentially.
  • 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
I think nowadays, Amazon EC2 is best-suited for most app development and deployment use cases, especially if your resource requirements are not fixed over a long period of time. The flexibility provided by the on-demand pricing and rescaling option makes Amazon EC2 a great service, especially if your tech stack already runs on AWS. On the other hand, I think Amazon EC2 is not the best option if your tech infrastructure runs on another public cloud.
Sunny Hemnani | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In our organization, we use EC2 to deploy our microservices-based applications on the development, staging, and production servers. With EC2 we get very high availability Linux servers at minimal cost per hour. It also supports auto-scaling whenever there is a huge load on the system. Our application is a microservices-based chatbot application in the healthcare domain.
  • Scalability.
  • Reliability.
  • High Availability.
  • Cost per hour.
  • Shared memory for multiple instances.
EC2 is very well suited for Java Applications where high availability is required. On production, developers can use a cheaper server and enable auto-scaling & high-performance servers for production. Docker-based or containerized applications are not suited for EC2 servers whereas Elastic Container Service (ECS) is more suited in those cases.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We do website design and development. We used AWS EC2 as a VPS server to host a variety of web applications, including Apache server, postfix-dovecot mail server. We also have an API server that orchestrates many of the different web services we make - ie. for analytics, billing, customer account management, etc.
  • 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.
You should stay away from EC2 if you want savings on your infrastructure bill. Only choose EC2 if you're a large corporation where you are using multiple AWS services and you want to integrate them together seamlessly - and also that infrastructure bill is of no concern to you. You want to also closely monitor your EC2 using cloudwatch (and set up alarms) for smaller instances as they tend to be less stable in my experience. Since I'm a small company, I prefer Linode or Digital Ocean, or OVH over EC2 any day.
Michael Weisel | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon EC2 is being used by our entire company in multiple locations across three countries. We reply on EC2 instances for all of our day-to-day tasks on both the front-end and the back-end. We migrated all of our services from brick-and-mortar data centers to our AWS EC2 instances. It's saved us money, time, and resources while providing a much more efficient and stable environment. It also affords us the ability to scale up and or down our environment without laying out hard costs for equipment.
  • Saves Money
  • Creates Efficiencies
  • Easy to Setup
  • Easy to Manage
  • Minor improvements to the EC2 User Interface
With a solid plan, we were able to migrate from our physical servers to our EC2 environment much easier than we had anticipated. Once migrated we found even more use cases for EC2 instances including consolidating services into smaller more efficient and cost-effective instances. Because there are so many choices of EC2 instances, we were able to tailor our environment and test different instances before settling. This also afforded us the flexibility of firing up a quick instance when needed and turning it down when we've completed our task. We have some instances that we use once a month that are all set up and ready to go when we need them.
Ana Baker | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances are easy to modify and really easy to use in production with beginners on Unix/Windows. Being compatible with many AWS utilities is also a huge virtue. It is common that you want to start the server without assuming the costs and the aptitude of care of the bare metal servers, another plus is the construction of instances worldwide can be carried out within a few seconds of time. That's what I like most about the EC2 instance.
  • 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.
The flexibility to select the right resource size for current needs is great - this has allowed us to scale our resources alongside the growth in the amount of work we put through EC2.
The great thing about Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud has been that this is one of Cloud Services, and among the most commonly used products for AWS Web service. Very flexible and quick to set up/launch compute resources.
Jacob Biguvu | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
EC2 provides the virtual computing environment to be used for multiple uses. Web applications can be launched. Databases can be installed when users want full control to manage the databases. Migration applications such as attunity (Qlik) replication tool, Oracle Goldengate etc, can be launched for the migration purposes such as database migration. EC2 can be used for data integration, data transformation, and data mining purpose. EC2 as the name implies has the capability to scale up the capacity vertically according to our needs.
  • 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.
EC2 can be used for many purposes. EC2 is not best when Amazon provided the expected service and support. For example, AWS Lambda was best to run certain jobs that run within 15 mins. EC2 is not required for the jobs which will be run within 15 mins. Following the best practices of AWS architecture, certainly helpful.
April 28, 2021

EC2 for Startups

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
EC2 is easy to get started with there are a lot of online resources for help. We use it to serve our online Django-based Rest and Graph API's to support our online application. The SSH EC2 feature is very great and makes it easy during deployment from a local machine. The free tier EC2 instance comes in handy to develop and deploy a prototype for testing.
  • 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.
The availability of free tier makes it a good choice to develop and test prototypes in early-stage startups.
The fact that the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud can be turned up quickly in case of an emergency, means that businesses have minimal downtime for their applications which makes Ec2 a great choice for backup and disaster recovery.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon EC2 is being used by my organization as the centralized cloud server hosting tool. It is being used across the entire organization and is one of the most important tools that we have to run our company. We run all types of servers from testing to development to staging servers and we use all different types of images when we run our servers. It solves the need to have a cloud based, infinitely scalable system to better host everything from applications to backend servers and so on.
  • 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
Amazon EC2 is one of the best tools a development and software company could ask for. It is infinitely scalable and relatively easy to use when it comes to all the things that we used to do that took a long time because human beings had to provision rack mounted servers by hand. It's less apporpriate for enterprise settings where there is still a presence of older, localized infrastructure.
Mark Freeman, MBA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are transitioning from on-premise to AWS for 100+ applications. Our products are highly regulated and must be always available since we are the company which matches buyers and sellers of equities in the stock market. The EC2s host our computer programs which match trades and perform other ancillary features such as hosting standard settlement instructions.
  • Automatic scaling of microservices
  • Fast CPUs
  • Selectable memory size
  • Unknown limits of managed services
  • Sharing of resources... Could have noisy-neighbors
  • Uncontrollable downtimes
Suited: - no hardware purchases - ease of setup and use Not suited: - regulations require Tier1 or 0 availability
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Similar to many other startups, our whole infrastructure is on top of AWS, and EC2 is being used in many ways across multiple departments.

DevOps supports a fleet of reserved EC2 instances to host backend services and pipelines using Kubernetes.
Data Science team uses EC2 instances to run Jupytor notebooks to do feature exploration on pre-loaded data, and sometimes spot instances to support ad-hoc feature generation and model training. Data team uses the spot instances to run backfill jobs whenever needed.
  • 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.
EC2 is really standing out when a team is committed to the AWS stack and wants to deploy production jobs on the long term. Reserved instances have competitive pricing and in general the reliability is guaranteed. Spot EC2 instances are also good, when a one-time backfill or feature generation workload needs to be performed.

For users who want to use a managed service, for example a Hadoop platform, I would recommend going with Cloudera and similar companies to get the best support possible.
Apurv Doshi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Amazon EC2 across the whole organization. We solve different business problems using EC2 as mentioned below:
1. We host multiple backend and cloud solutions on EC2.
2. When we want to train Machine Learning Models that need heavy computation and GPU power, we go with EC2.
3. Some solutions are not mandatory to keep up all the time. We use cloud formation script which spins up EC2 - host the solution and thrash it down when not needed.
  • 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.
EC2 is extremely suited when you want to do prototyping before purchasing heavy instance on-premises. This provides a clear indication that what kind of configuration is best suited for the need and demand. It is also flexible in terms of acquiring computational capabilities by spot instance, on-demand instance and reserved instances. We are using it a lot to train Machine Learning models. We made sure the script runs well on a small instance and once the script is finalized, we switch to bigger instances for faster computation.
Since EC2 is a complex service, it requires proper monitoring of usage. While users are a novice, it requires a bit more examination for proper usage.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) both internally for virtual machines for both production and testing, and for clients' virtual machines for both production and testing. Being able to spin up virtual machines on the fly with no major infrastructure investment and for minimal startup cost was a complete game-changer for our business.
  • 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.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is extremely useful for small virtual servers. For instance, we use EC2 instances for inexpensive unifi cloud controllers. Additionally, we often use EC2 instances for testing various applications and server configurations. We can spin up an entire lab, virtual servers, workstations, etc and test out a client-server application in hours and at very little expense.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) across the whole organization for multiple web applications and custom software running in the cloud. EC2 is our first choice to run our applications as it helps auto-scaling and elasticity. It reduces the maintenance of an in-house data center and can spin up new servers in less than 5 minutes.
  • Auto scaling
  • Security
  • On demand
  • I wish amazon come up with a GUI interface for EC2's
EC2 is my first choice for all my application deployments in the cloud as it has great features like auto-scaling and multiple categories like reserved instances, on-demand, and scheduled ones.
Gabriel Samaroo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The engineering department uses Amazon EC2 to host all the servers we run our applications on. EC2 is a fantastic product because it is very cost effective and easy to use. If you need to quickly provision a new server, you can use the admin console to create whatever you need, from very small simple setups to extremely large, complex systems.
  • 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.
I would recommend using amazon EC2 in any scenario where a company or individual needs to run a server. Because of the ease of use and configuration, there is hardly a reason to buy and manage your own hardware. Anything from a very simple website to a complex application with hundreds of servers can be setup using EC2.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
EC2 is being used primarily by one major division (department) of our organization but indirectly by the entire organization. The main division that uses it is tasked with continuously developing new tools and technologies for organization-wide use and EC2 allows us to quickly and efficiently obtain and configure the necessary servers for each new project and subproject as they arise, or as the ideas come to us without having to go through the lengthy traditional channels of submitting proposals, and requesting budgeting etc each time we need more server space.
  • 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.
EC2 is a perfect solution for a team of skilled developers who are familiar with cloud computing, able to make basic translations, and cannot be hassled by the politics/paperwork shuffle of dealing with the ebb and flow of server changes. EC2 would not be a good solution for a very small team with perhaps a single server need or perhaps a larger team with multiple server needs but without technical personnel.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We primarily use AWS EC2 instances to host our websites and web applications on both production and development servers. It is mainly used by our web and app development departments but impacts the entire organization. It saves the company money by offering a wide variety of server options and the ability to scale the server size up and down quickly, and at our discretion.
  • 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 is well suited for hosting files, websites, and applications on the internet and replacing GoDaddy or HostGator for your hosting needs.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In our project, we are using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud as our main application cluster. It provides a virtual instance in which users can configure its CPU, memory, and other crucial settings. It also provides auto-scalability, which is very important during high traffic on your application. With EC2 we quickly set up our application instances for different environments, and we are pretty satisfied with the service.
  • 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.
EC2 is very suitable if you have a multi-environment application and you are still using the other services of Amazon, such as Lambda with API Gateway. In our project, we have had more than 10 EC2 instances running for 3 years, and we did not have any downtime or face any security issues.
July 07, 2019

A Great Choice

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are migrating multiple customers' environments to the cloud, most specifically, using Amazon Web Services. We take current servers and rebuild them in Amazon's cloud environment using EC2. The ability to quickly take a current server and migrate it at a 1:1 ratio into the cloud is a huge plus, especially when there are thousands that we migrate.
  • 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.
EC2 is taking over physical and other virtual environments. The ability to quickly turn up and down, clone, create, or terminate a server on the fly, from anywhere in the world is a huge plus. Having the entire environment live in the AWS console means that management is central and much more efficient. EC2 is also great for a dev environment. If you want to, in minutes stand up a dev server, EC2 is the top choice. However, if you require a physical server, obviously AWS EC2 instances will not be the best choice.
June 21, 2019

EC2: Game changer

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Elastic Compute Cloud to run our production loads and for experimental and proof of concept work. It allows us to quickly scale and iterate through multiple generations of ideation as we work to solve critical business problems. Additionally, Elastic Cloud Compute allows us to deploy resources and restrict access in policies in an agile manner as we work with contractors and third parties.
  • 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.
If they need anything in the cloud where they want to stand something up from the operating system up, Elastic Compute Cloud is a no brainer. With the versatility and speed to which you can create resources to suit your needs, there is no comparison. Elastic Block Storage, in addition to Elastic Compute Cloud, is a game changer for virtualization.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are a fast growing financial tech startup based in North Carolina. We sell financial products targeted at banks and credit unions. Built on top of the Salesforce platform we've expanded our offerings with more custom solutions. As a result we've developed several apps that are deployed atop the Amazon EC2 cloud. The cloud deployments are used company wide both for internal testing as well as by the clients in our production instances.
  • 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.
Amazon EC2 offerings are great if you have web applications that have elastic demand, since Amazon handles the scaling of extra resources all on its own. If the goal is to just host a simple static website, then using regular web hosting companies would be much cheaper and simpler.
Dylan Cauwels | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon EC2 is the backbone of any cloud deployment for our organization. As one of the first services launched on AWS, it holds a special place in any infrastructure project that we run. The amount of customizability that you have with EC2 is unlike any other AWS service and allows you to find the perfect computing solution for whatever use case you need.
  • 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.
EC2 is great for any scenario where you need to be upgrading/downgrading your compute power as the app demand grows/shrinks. Because of how the storage system, network system, and security system works under AWS, you can hot swap any server into any given slot. But if you want to customize your servers to the nth degree, then you should just go ahead and purchase them for your network. AWS will never be as customizable as company-run machines, but they will be faster to deploy.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
EC2 is used by us for the majority of our servers. We use it to support cloud-based applications that run on servers. EC2 substitutes having to run servers locally in our datacenters. EC2 is just as basic virtual machine system that allows us to customize them in any way we want and add whatever software we need.
  • 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
EC2 is an excellent service if you need to replace the power of a data center with many machines all interconnected with networking and a great automation system to set up your environment in a single button press. It is less ideal for smaller scale operations where you only need a server or two or expect to have very light load on your servers and don't need all the extra power provided by EC2.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use it for our entire production and load testing infrastructures.
  • 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
It’s very flexible for almost any workload. It’s hard to think of a scenario where racking your own servers would be better than using AWS.
Return to navigation