Amazon Web Services

Score8.6 out of 10

743 Reviews and Ratings

What is Amazon Web Services?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing services. With over 165 services offered, AWS services can provide users with a comprehensive suite of infrastructure and computing building blocks and tools.

Categories & Use Cases

Infrastructure-as-a-Service

Elastic load balancing
Automatic balancing and distribution of resources across multiple virtual computers
Category average: 9
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime
The service uptime as a percentage defined in the SLA
Category average: 8.6
Dynamic scaling
Ease of scaling up or down in response to customer needs
Category average: 8.7

Operating system support
Range of operating systems available as pre-configured images
Category average: 8.4
Automation
Automation of administrative tasks
Category average: 7.6
Pre-configured templates
Pre-defined templates for virtual machines
Category average: 8

Most Frequent Users

Top 3 industries using Amazon Web Services.

Based on HG Insights installation data

View all Reviews

#1 most frequent

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

7.0%

513,300 installations of 7,343,339

#2 most frequent

Information

2.9%

213,105 installations of 7,343,339

#3 most frequent

Manufacturing

2.6%

193,045 installations of 7,343,339

Pros

Provides comprehensive infrastructure for compute, SaaS, PaaS, and DBaaS.
Offers high scalability and flexibility to handle peak loads and dynamic resource needs.
Delivers consistent reliability and high availability across its services.

Cons

Perceived as costly, particularly for smaller organizations, with a need for greater billing transparency.
Inconsistent user interface in the web console creates a steeper learning curve.
Documentation can lack comprehensiveness and clarity, especially for troubleshooting specific issues.

Brian Vest

Digital Lead in Corporate at Net Clicks (11-50 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We host websites and content on AWS. We use Lightsail because it is exponentially faster than products like GoDaddy and even Hostinger. In addition, our price depends on usage and is not arbitrarily set to a maximum we will never reach. The invoice shows exact usage levels, so there are no surprises.

Pros

Speed
Price
Uptime
Options
Transparency

Cons

UX
Organization
Personal Support

Return on Investment

Saved me $1000's.
Improved our SEO rating.
Page load times are in the 99th percentile.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Hostinger and GoDaddy

Other Software Used

GoDaddy, Hostinger, Wix

Michael Bravo View profile

Cloud Infrastructure Engineer in Engineering at Wix (1001-5000 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use AWS as a primary cloud provider across a range of services. That includes managed compute fleet, networking, covers some of the load balancing and multi region disaster recover scenarios, as well as some higher level things like managed Kubernetes, some databases, logging, analytics and many other elements across AWS offerings

Pros

Reliability
Comprehensive offerings
Support that works

Cons

Web console UI is sometimes inconsistent
Some services have historical feature gaps that take time to get addressed
Things can always be cheaper

Return on Investment

IF you plan and execute well, in many cases you can get very positive outcomes for buy vs build
IF you are not careful and diligent, you can get very negative runaway costs - and it will be on *you*
Always try to honestly think if you *need* to build on the cloud. Some things are possible to build and maintain on your own, cheaper AND better. But you need to be on top of all the aspects.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Google Cloud Platform and Azure Cloud Services

Other Software Used

Kubernetes, Apache Kafka, Debian OS

Arvind Kumar View profile

Senior Software Engineering Lead in Engineering at Optum (10,001+ employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using various services of Amazon Web Services for storage, compute, container orchestration and a lot more. We are using S3 for storage of various documents and files. EC2 and Lambda for deploying some services and APIs. ECS for deploying containers based applications. We are also using Amazon Web Services Route 53 for DNS management. Apart from this, we use cognito, API gateway, Glue, secret manager and a lot more. Amazon Web Services makes it fast and easy to provision the infrastructure.

Pros

Security group changes takes effect in real time.
Storing blob files is very easy with S3.
IAM makes access management very easy.

Cons

When there is any misconfiguration of EC2 related to SSM Connect. It doesn't clearly states that what particular configuration is missing.
Debugging networking related issues could be improved.
From the security group page, it's difficult to determine which resource a security group is associated with.

Return on Investment

Provisioning resources like large database instances is really quick. We can easily scale our instances up or down as per need.
Storing files in S3 instead of onprem NAS drives is much more economical, especially for the files stored in glacier deep archive for compliance purposes.
Backup snapshots of EBS volumes and RDS instances may increase the cost of cloud if not cleaned up properly.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform

Other Software Used

Microsoft Azure, HashiCorp Terraform, Oracle Java SE

Michael Nemeyer View profile

Senior Associate in Finance and Accounting at Rock Creek (51-200 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Amazon Web Services offers a diverse range of services. It's an adaptable platform for a number of applications and business needs. Amazon Web Services is super scalable and flexible, is quite cost-effective, user-friendly, reliable, and secure.

Pros

Wide range of services
User-friendly dashboard/interface
Scalable and flexible

Cons

Pricing structure can be complex
It can be difficult to learn for beginners
Sometimes can be not user-friendly

Return on Investment

Cloud Storage
Scalability
Security

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Google Cloud AI, Microsoft Azure and Fortinet on IBM Cloud

Simon Cookes View profile

CEO in Product Management at LARKI (1-10 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have a software SaaS company. We use Amazon Web Services S3, EC2, domain hosting and other services.

Pros

storage
compute
startup credits

Cons

login
customer support
billing
notifications
user management

Return on Investment

Amazon Web Services went down for 24 hours. So our business had to shut down for 24 hours

Amazon Web Services

What is Amazon Web Services?

Categories & Use Cases