Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

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.

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.

EC2 is great for running traditional software workloads, if you are building a new application Lambda may be a better candidate.

For any work involving data processes and recovering insights from it, usually the most costly and complex process is to set up the data platform on which all the hard statistical work is done later. With EC2 all those integrations are relatively easy and can be scaled up without too much pain.

The larger the company, the better AWS seems to fit. The 2 primary reasons for this are price and security features. For more budget-focused startups, there are significantly cheaper solutions out there with far fewer security features. Mid-sized to enterprise level companies, however, will require the AWS security features if they are to authorize the use of cloud computing instances over in-house data centers.

[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.

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.

EC2 is well suited for professionals who know what they want and need. Speaking generally EC2 would not do well for end-consumers or home users. Its complexity can be tough to bypass and it makes knowing the products, services and technologies essential to its use. Resellers can make lots of money and still keep their manageability at a realistic level!

Quickly deploy server with any operating system without worrying about imaging and setting up.

From small static web sites to full blown applications

EC2 is an excellent alternative to in-house hardware for small to medium sized businesses for hosting web servers and spawning build systems for compiling for different operating systems. It's been powering my production apps for the last 5 years or so, ever since I gave up on the idea of having my business running off of desktops in my dorm room. However, cloud computing is rapidly becoming a commodity: my current company runs mostly on Azure, my blog is a static site hosted on GitHub pages, and both of these decisions were made simply because Microsoft and GitHub offered more cost-effective solutions for my use case. EC2 is great, but not sufficiently better than DigitalOcean, Azure, etc. to justify paying extra in my experience.

It's great to prototype cloud infrastructure, and when you need some very specific configurations. EC2 is well suited to dynamically growing infrastructure based on demand, for self-service environments for your engineering team, and for very particular configurations where other cloud vendors may not have a specific solution. Great for legacy applications.

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.

EC2 is appropriate for:

• Long running tasks
• Tasks that require additional computing power
• Tasks that require variable amounts of computing power
• Scheduled tasks
• Tasks that require a specific build of a language

It is not as appropriate for:

• Doing scheduling itself
• Very on-demand tasks (other AWS options are better)
• Companies on an extreme budget

EC2 is a great service for anyone that wants to quickly and cost effectively deploy and operate web servers, as anyone with any level of experience can launch a machine within minutes, having almost zero prior experience in very little time. In other words, if you are a startup with limited funds and staff that just needs to deploy an environment very rapidly, while saving as much money and time as possible, then no better solution is available, the same can also be said for an existing company with the same goals. Yet, if your business is in a competitive field, where page load times, site uptime, and stability are critical, then other options do exist, and those options are slowly creeping down to the same area as AWS. Take advantage of the one year AWS trial, before you start paying for services.