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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…

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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 …
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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

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Pricing

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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
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Product Demos

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Training @ VICTORYSOST

YouTube
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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
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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).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(346)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 26)
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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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
September 15, 2018

Scale up with EC2!

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are currently using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) across the Engineering team as a way to deploy our applications. It allowed us to scale up from Heroku as we continue to grow. It also helped the ease of have all of our services under the AWS umbrella for accessibility.
  • Leverage S3 for backup, storage, and serve up large files
  • Increased bandwidth
  • Increased speed of deployment
  • Pay-as-you-use pricing model
  • Dependency on the product - major outages leave you in a tough spot.
  • Cross-region communication - complex to setup
  • Networking is less flexible compared to other providers
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.
Corey Birkmann | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have utilized EC2 for a wide variety of clients to help deploy a variety of websites & web applications & mobile apps. It is affordable and scalable. Has provide phenomenal uptime, and support has been top notch on the rare occasion I have had to reach out on an issue or question.
  • Cost effictiveness is great, they only charge for what you use so you do not have to pay for what you dont use
  • Intuitive interface, makes setting up and deploying new and existing projects an ease
  • Secure. Have not had server attacks since we migrated to them, so the uptime has been phenomenal
  • The PEM keys are a bit confusing if you are not accustomed to it
  • A dummy version/starter guide would be great. Once you have it configured its easy to use and makes sense, but my first interaction with it was a bit to grasp
  • Add easily installable cPanel or Plesk or equivalent as an option for customers just wanting to host sites, who don't need the more in-depth options
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
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
All our APIs and microservices in our organization run on EC2. My organization is one of the largest users of AWS cloud. We have our dev, qa, perf, prod environments running on AWS. As part of that, most of our code runs directly on EC2 or on ECS which itself runs on EC2.
  • We write micro services in spring boot that runs on EC2.
  • Our front ends use node js and those applications run on EC2
  • lot of our enterprise support applications like Jenkins, Confluence, JIRA etc run on aws ec2
  • EC2 are elastic linux containers to run any application. This is a very good and reliable service. Improvements could be in UI/dashboard and metric presentation. Tools for visualization of cost optimization should be better for users who have lots of applications running on EC2
  • ECS and EKS are being used in docker and kubernetes environments. So more tech companies are use these services than directly using EC2
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.
James Hilton | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it for dev instances, staging instances and production instances for the whole organization. We automatically spin up instances as needed, automatically configure the settings and software we need, and it's ready to go in seconds. Prior to this we used managed hosting which caused too many problems with bad customer support and limited access to the servers preventing us from solving our own problems with bugs and scaling.
  • Full control over the software and settings.
  • Instant availability of a new server with the power you require.
  • Thorough permission support to ensure only those who have the rights to monitor or configure the servers can do so.
  • Many world wide locations to make sure it's closer to the country your users are in.
  • Huge learning curve. To get a basic instance up with default settings is very easy, but there's hundreds or perhaps thousands of settings without explanations of what they do.
  • Multiple ways to do the same thing, like the browser console, the command line, and APIs, means finding answers on how to do something may be provided only in one way and not the way you have to do it.
  • Lack of documentation on best practices in many scenarios. AWS assumes you have devops experience and makes it too easy for you to make mistakes and follow bad practices.
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.
Brendon Brown | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have been using Amazon's EC2 service to host our Magento eCommerce website on Amazon's AMI. We have been doing this for 10 months now, and between uptime and manageability we are very pleased. We chose this platform for the attractive prospect of usage-based billing and potential for provisioning more resources as we grow as well as auto-scaling and load balancing options. The migration was hand-in-hand with a re-development, platform and host were new, so comparing to our old Wordpress store on shared hosting would not be apples to apples at all. All said, we have been please with AWS EC2 on the whole.
  • It's a very easy task to fire up an EC2, even for first-timer education. Launch a free account, pop into EC2, and follow the prompts.
  • Snapshots and Images are particularly nice, fast and easy to work with. I've had my entire catalog erased by mistake, and been able to restore content within minutes.
  • Access to data is right there - you have root access to your virtual machine, no clunky interfaces, no negotiation with hosts for resources.
  • EC2 is quick to launch, but ends up being an unnecessarily complex rabbit hole. Most users on EC2 are attempting to accomplish the same goals: host content with close to 0 fault tolerance. I want people to be able to buy my stuff. I should be able to one-click a load balancing and autoscaling package for my existing EC2 instance that will scale resources in proportion to my incoming sessions and corresponding usage. Instead, setting up advanced EC2 features ends up requiring an expert to accomplish functions which should be readily available.
  • Usage-based billing sounds like you may be getting the best value, but understand that Amazon is not losing money on hosting, and costs are no longer entirely predictable. Cents for data piles up quickly and once you get load balancing up with a influx of customers, your finance department comes at you waving your budget around...
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.
Michael Kerzner | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
We are a Managed Services Provider in the Philadelphia area that specializes in moving clients to the cloud. As part of our Cloud Stack, we heavily deploy AWS technologies including EC2. I personally manages multiple AWS accounts that all have EC2 instances in both development and production. EC2 tackles a huge problem when it comes to right-sizing your servers. With EC2, we can spin up a server in the cloud for a client, let them test it, and if it turns out the specs aren't right, within 5 minutes we can have everything changed to a completely different set of specs.
  • EC2 makes right-sizing your servers a breeze. You can quickly spin up a server in the cloud and if it turns out the vCPU, RAM, or storage space is wrong, within minutes you can change all of that.
  • EC2 makes backups and restores a breeze. We actually had a client that allowed a hacker to remote into their production server. We were able to shutdown the EC2 instance, spin up a backup from an AMI, and then attach the existing elastic IP. This was all done within a 15 minute window.
  • EC2 makes quickly deploying multiple servers a very easy. Within minutes, you can deploy a whole fleet of cloud servers.
  • EC2 is easy to script. We are able to save our clients a lot of money by scripting their EC2 instance to shutdown/startup at predetermined times so they are only paying for the server when they are using it.
  • EC2 in my opinion, is lacking the ability to connect to a console from within the AWS console. I sometimes miss how I can connect to the console with VMware and Hyper-V but not with EC2. You have to utilize RDP or SSH to connect to an instance.
  • Sometimes EC2 instances lockup due to reasons with the underlying hardware and need to be shutdown and the started back up so the instance can spin up on new hardware. This is sometimes a problem because unless you set up proper alerting/scripting, you don't know there is an issue until a user reports it.
  • EC2 can be a bit daunting for the beginning user. You really do need some kind of training before you dive in.
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our product was redesigned from the ground up to use EC2. The way that our product has been architected helps up utilize the EC2 infrastructure effectively and has cut our hosting costs by 900%. It has also greatly lowers the difficulty of deploying new releases to all of our customers.
  • On demand instances for limited time and heavy processing greatly saves on cost.
  • Reserved instances allow for cost savings for instances that you plan on having running all of the time.
  • Many options of instance types allow you to customize the type of processing you need.
  • Programming and product changes may be required to use EC2 in the most efficient way.
  • EC2 is best used by rethinking your hosting model. You get the most benefit by throwing out the idea of just launching a virtual machine per customer.
  • Most users don't understand the pricing model and miss out on cost savings.
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.
Bill Artinger | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our whole organization uses EC2 in a sense that all of our data and all of our clients' backups are stored there. We can address the problem of availability and scalability, putting both us and our customers at ease. They can know their data is safe and always available to them regardless of conditions
  • Scales up and down with ease!
  • Cost effective and easy to understand billing/cost analysis
  • Many many tools and documentation available for use. Always expanding and changing landscape
  • Can be very difficult to get an initial grasp of how things work at EC2 due to proprietary terms and technologies
  • The sign-in page has changed a few times, and with its most recent update can be confusing to some
  • Billing section can be hard to find at times, but the search function really comes through when looking for features
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.
November 28, 2017

Best on the market!!

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
My company is using EC2 for running their website, which includes java web service & angularjs client, which I'm building. I'm a developer, so, I don't have a lot of experience configuring the network. Fortunately, there are people with whom I'm doing it. I just need to define the security group to limit who can access our system. It is easy to setup load balancing & autoscaling.
  • Launch wizards for new users
  • Security groups management for EC2 containers
  • Very easy to use for a regular user
  • Extensive Documentation
  • UI could be improved.
  • They can reduce the price a bit.
  • They can increase the free tier limit.
Before choosing Amazon EC2, I would recommend making some cost projections based on projected use of the application when it goes into production if the projected costs are in the range of your project's capabilities I totally recommend choosing it because you'll avoid costs about data redundancy and system administration.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
EC2 is being used to host both development/testing and production instances of small-scale web applications (<3000 users). These applications vary in engine (Node, PHP, Python, etc.) and EC2 gives us a flexible, project-agnostic platform to deploy and test upon.

We use EC2 to pull down current master copies of our code for QA as well as reference tagged versions for our production clusters.
  • Cheap -- just about the cheapest you can get out of any options on the market
  • CLI administration makes setup and maintenance a breeze -- version controllable dev infrastructure without the overhead of made-for-purpose infra VCS services is great
  • Flexible authentication systems -- Amazon goes above and beyond to handle complex security arrangements well
  • Well organized web UI
  • Low level networking support is minimal but getting better
  • EBS outages hurt, and I haven't been thrilled with reliability in previous months (it's been better since, though)
  • Latency for storage and instance provisioning can be frustrating while the tech is in the gap between provisioning that takes minutes vs. instant provisioning (waiting 30 secs - 1 minute for storage to provision, for example)
EC2 is awesome if your prime need is scalability -- the "elastic" component of Elastic Compute is really what makes this a win. The ability to scale right up with the click of a button means that provisioning new instances to handle surges in production traffic or creating lots of test beds for the QA team is where your money is well spent. If you don't anticipate peaky traffic or find yourself with very static machine needs, simply provisioning a few instances by hand in the other non-EC2 parts of AWS is probably better -- you might even just consider a couple VPSs.
Justin Schroeder | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use EC2 and a host of related products to serve up 2 of our 3 SAAS products. EC2 gives us the ability to spin up servers around the world and tightly integrate with other AWS services like RDS and S3. Perhaps the most useful feature of EC2 is the ability to relatively easily create autoscaling clusters of servers to serve your products.
  • A built in service to create autoscaling clusters is a killer feature of EC2. Autoscaling now has a full GUI administration system which allows you to create your clusters by relatively easy point-and-click.
  • Starting, stopping, and monitoring EC2 instances is a total breeze.
  • Autoscaling now has a full GUI administration system which allows you to create your clusters by relatively easy point-and-click.
  • The AIM "Images" are surprisingly reliable and also easy to create. Storing them is an extreemely low cost way to add an additional layer of backup redundancy (although they say it shouldnt be your primary backup). We've found it very convienient.
  • The user interface is still far behind similar tools like Rackspace.
  • You cannot create AIM images without server downtime, so the server you create an image of must be in a cluster behind a load balancer. This is a big drawback compared to other services that can create images while the service is in use. Sometimes you just don't want to use a full cluster for minor applications.
  • Load balancers are really easy to use but lack some features other hosts provide. For example, the SSL termination is not nearly as sophisticated as most standard load balancer servers.
[Well suited for] Creating a high-availability, medium-cost, platform for hosting products. EC2, because of its integration with S3, RDS, CDN and other tooling makes it an absolute must. If you want to host a wordpress site on a single server instance "on the cheap" it's really not the right service. EC2 instances fail at a higher rate than any other web host I've used. The expectation is that if you want even mediocre uptime with AWS you *will* use a server cluster.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using Amazon Elastic Cloud (EC2) for our web applications and analytics work. Right now we have implemented it in few departments only but we are planning to implement it across the organization. EC2 is very helpful in providing infrastructure support for a growing business. Earlier we were relying on our in-house infrastructure team, but it's tough to grow infrastructure with your business growth. For a scalable infrastructure we decided to move to the cloud, and after considering many factors we find that AWS EC2 is best for our requirements.
  • One year free tier subscription, which makes it very cost effective for training the new resources.
  • Large communities with thousands of machines having preinstalled software as per need.
  • AWS EC2 has a very competitive pricing scheme with on-demand, spot instances plan and reserved instances.
  • Sharing AMI is the one of best features. You can share your machine image with another user.
  • Although AWS EC2 is best in the market, in addition, they could provide more robust monitoring tools for EC2 resources.
  • They don't have the facility to block IPs for inbound traffic. Although this can be achieved by carefully allowing the inbound traffic. But adding the flexibility to block IPs or exclude some IPs from inbound would be great.
  • They need to provide one dashboard where they could show the list of all the resources from a region. Right now a user needs to select a particular region to check the resources being used.
AWS Elastic Compute Cloud is one of the best cloud computing technologies among all their competitors whether its Azure or Google. AWS EC2 is available with very competitive pricing and based on the wide market it’s very easy to get AWS technical experts. And as it has much more functionality along with EC2 like S3 RDS route53, this makes it a one stop for all infrastructure needs.
August 30, 2016

Amazon EC2

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
This is our primary data store. We use it for both versioning our deployment builds as well as for storing static assets. This addresses the business problem of having a server to store assets as well as giving us the ability to store multiple versions of files that we deploy to production. Its bundling and easy interface make it an obvious choice.
  • It is incredibly easy to manage the content both in their dashboard and the terminal
  • It's makes scaling trivial
  • The price per benefit ratio is the standard
  • It can be complicated for new users
  • It is one of the pricier solutions, but you get what you pay for
  • Sometimes understanding how to interface it with other products is difficult
It's great for almost any situation, both big and small. The only time I would not recommend it is if the use case is incredibly trivial or the user is trying to save money. It's definitely the perfect option for any startup that needs a solution when they're small but also the flexibility to scale as the company grows.
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