Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud review for Machine Learning Developers
I use it for training machine learning models. I use the Deep Learning AMIs available to spin up Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances …
Starting at $0.01 per IP address with a running instance per hour on a pro rata basis
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What is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)?
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Users can launch instances with a variety of OSs, load them with custom application environments, manage network access permissions, and…
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Popular Features
- Pre-configured templates (17)9.595%
- Dynamic scaling (17)9.393%
- Elastic load balancing (17)9.292%
- Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime (17)8.686%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
Data Transfer
$0.00 - $0.09
Cloud
per GB
On-Demand
$0.0042 - $6.528
Cloud
per Hour
EBS-Optimized Instances
$0.005
Cloud
per IP address with a running instance per hour on a pro rata basis
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Demos
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Training @ VICTORYSOST
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Product Details
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- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)?
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Users can launch instances with a variety of OSs, load them with custom application environments, manage network access permissions, and run images on multiple systems.
Key Features
Bare metal instances
Amazon EC2 Fleet (fleet management)
Pause and resume instances
GPU compute instances
GPU graphics instances
High I/O instances
Dense HDD storage instances
Optimized CPU configurations
Flexible storage options
Pay-as-you-go pricing
Place instances in multiple locations
Elastic IP addresses
Auto-scale capacity up or down
HPC clusters
Elastic Fabric Adapter
Available on AWS PrivateLink
Amazon Time Sync Service
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Users can launch instances with a variety of OSs, load them with custom application environments, manage network access permissions, and run images on multiple systems.
Reviewers rate Pre-defined machine images highest, with a score of 9.8.
The most common users of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Reviews and Ratings
(341)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
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November 28, 2017
Best on the market!!
- 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.
October 17, 2017
EC2 -- take your QA and scaling woes to the cloud!
- 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)
October 09, 2017
Trusted reliable performance for SAAS Applications
- EC2 makes it easy to move to the cloud. You can spin up Windows servers, any flavour of Linux, pre-baked amazon public or marketplace images with applications pre-installed.
- EC2 is great to test your proof of concept. Spin up as many servers as you want for your tests, run your tests for a few minutes and only pay for the time they are running.
- EC2 with Elastic Load Balancing and AutoScaling provides an environment where you no longer worry about individual servers or about spikes in traffic. Any failed serves are automatically replaced, and when a spike occurs servers scale up and down to handle the load, while keeping costs at a minimum.
- EC2 parameter store allows us to store application secrets, keeping them secure and only available to EC2 instances with the roles to allow access.
- The only area for improvement that I've been looking for is shorter billing increments than 1 hour. This has just recently come into effect with per second billing as of Oct 2nd 2017.
- Data and data clustering architecture
- Data Exploitation process
- Fair cost for a bay of servers
- More features already integrated
- Easy to compute the final cost of the service
- Always ready to scale up (or down) with your business without extra cost or complication
- Stability is a big key of EC2 - it does what it says it does every time.
- Flexibility is great for EC2. You can spin up instances from a standard image (e.g. Ubuntu), your own AMI built from CI (unique AMIs for each deployment), or one of the 80k+ of community AMIs.
- Ability to run instances in your own Virtual Private Cloud - a MUST for many larger organizations.
- Tremendous security options.
- Compared to several newer cloud providers (e.g. DigitalOcean), EC2 instances create and destroy very slowly. This is generally not an issue, but can be for some.
- AWS is incredibly featureful, and therefore, not the most simple of services to learn.
- AWS is slowly upgrading their UI, which is helpful. It's a little behind other UIs, but not too bad.
July 28, 2017
It scales – if you know what you're doing
- 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.
- 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.
May 22, 2017
Amazon EC2 - Is it for your business?
- We run a backup server in the cloud that is highly elastic - grow or shrink as needed on demand
- We run image repositories in EC2 and again, they are highly elastic in a sense that you can shrink or grow when needed
- Amazon is excellent at offering a plethora of services and technologies to mix and match how you need to
- Amazon should offer a managed option at a premium
- Amazon EC2 can be daunting and scary - it's all a-la-carte
- EC2 can be more thorough with documentation or giving case specific examples
April 03, 2017
EC2 to the rescue!
- Many flavors of Linux are available. Includes Windows also.
- Very fast in spinning up new instances.
- Has good monitoring tools.
- Good documentation of the AMI.
- Permission issues and Firewall issue for newbies.
- Include some good GUI native tools.
March 30, 2017
AWS EC2 ROCKS SOCKS
- Fast
- Affordable
- Easy to use
- Straight to the point
- A bit of a learning curve at first
- Not much I would change
- More free options :)
March 14, 2017
Great tool but cloud computing is a commodity
- Point-and-click spawning of production-ready instances running whichever OS you prefer.
- Solid API for more advanced use cases. Instead of having in-house Windows build machines you can just spawn EC2 instances via API to build your project on demand.
- AMIs make it easy to set up a machine once and make copies of it once you need to scale.
- The UI is cumbersome and confusing
- The API is usually reliable but hard to rely on at scale - spawning a machine via API sometimes just hangs
- Online support is borderline non-existent. If something goes wrong, you're probably on your own.
March 14, 2017
EC2 great for legacy, meh for everything else.
- Industry standard -- most people who've worked w/ cloud applications have used EC2.
- Easy self-service provisioning once you have IAM configured correctly.
- Lots of compute units with memory / CPU and storage differentiation, many ways to set up a cost-effective environment.
- Can't create custom compute units (specific RAM, SSD and CPU allotments).
- IO seemed to be slower than Google Compute Engine.
- IAM is not straightforward to configure.
August 30, 2016
Amazon EC2
- 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
August 30, 2016
AWS EC2 for Data Science
- Flexible: Can get exactly the specs you need, on demand.
- AWS CLI: The EC2 API via the AWS CLI is great for debugging, monitoring, etc.
- Reliable: Rarely have problems or unexpected behavior related to EC2 itself.
- Logging: Sometimes getting the correct logs are difficult.
- Speed: Spinning up a cluster isn't always fast.
- Pricing: The documentation isn't super clear on how hours are incurred for pricing.
- Deploys Virtual Servers, which are very easily configurable and deployable, regardless of experience.
- Saves cost by reducing physical hardware costs, and IT management costs.
- Allows very fast deployment of servers, within minutes instead of hours.
- Offers a wide variety of additional services, including S3 storage, RDS Database services, & more, at one easy web portal with one bill.
- Remote desktops are one of the few areas where EC2 doesn't work well due to the hardware requirements, though AWS has recently released a remote desktop service that comes out to being more cost effective than an internal Citrix deployment.
- Hardware customization is also rather hard to deal with, as few options are available when choosing a configuration, which can cause problems in heavily customized OS systems, and development scenarios.
- EC2 on its own is flawed in the way it is deployed, having the customer chose a geographic "zone" where the services are hosted, which sort of kills one of the main reasons for using the cloud, which is being geographically diverse.
- EC2 supposedly gives you the ability to "choose" your geographical location, "if it is not under heavy use". This is one problem I have run into lately, as many of my customers are in California, and are being required to use an Oregon zone due to high use if they want to avoid additional charges. Think of zones in a real estate sense, location is cost. This can become an issue when competition is high, because users hate to wait for a site to load. If you are in CA, serving CA customers through an Oregon zone, your service will be slower than competition physically hosted in California.