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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.https://media.trustradius.com/product-logos/F5/0A/920CWTJUFVTN.pngAmazon AWSAmazon Web Services2014-08-13T17:25:18.262ZIT at Qualbe uses Amazon Web Services to do software development, perform testing and for production infrastructure supporting web servers, DNS and database applications.,Database Services
Virtualization of Windows and Linux instances,CloudWatch alarms are dropped when an instance is terminated and regenerated from an AMI. There is no way to transfer CloudWatch alarms.
Tag retention. There is no way to retain a set of tags so they can be applied to a new EC2. They die with the previous EC2.,10,Scalability is a major factor to our use of AWS. As we grow we can quickly spin up instances and AWS scales with our business. The upfront capital investment of computer hardware is avoided.
We can pay for just what we use. We don't have hardware sitting around collecting dust.
Reliability. Faulty hardware is no longer a concern for us.,,6,10,Implemented in-houseDoug SymesAWS - a solid platform for building cloud solutions2014-02-04T00:16:07.505ZAWS is the platform that we use to deliver secure, highly-available solutions in the cloud. We deploy it for the entire company, as well as for our clients.,High-availability; AWS has an amazing capacity for spinning up resources across multiple zones, territories and services.
Auto-scaling; This requires some expertise, but a solution with proper architecture can support a virtually infinite user base.
Security and compliance, but this takes some expertise and understanding,Billing support - Bills are verbose, but difficult to allocate across different projects or software stacks without creating (and then verifying) multiple billing accounts
Ease of use: documentation and community are powerful and large, but there is a learning curve to be able to leverage the full power of AWS.
Solutions - AWS is still very much infrastructure building blocks. Launching a solution, say scalable SharePoint in the cloud, is not in the AWS repertoire.,8,AWS has let us build our business. That's key.,,9Jeremy SnyderAWS is #1 Hosting Provider from Software Entrepreneur Perspective2014-08-15T22:11:50.845ZWe create web based software and we always use Amazon as our primary hosting solution. We deploy to EC2 either using Beanstalk or setting up instances ourselves, host databases on RDB, all our DNS are on Route 53, balance load through AWS balancers, all content on S3, for security seasons for a few clients we used AWS VPC with VPN connection.,If you use Route 53 your DNS records can be updated almost instantly
EC2 gives you enough control over your instances without any hassle
RDB does backups for your data so you don't have to worry about database crashes and losing your data at all
Beanstalk allows you to deploy apps to AWS and it scales your apps for you. Amazing!,I have a number of AWS accounts and it would be cool if I could switch between them without logging out and logging in.,10,AWS is actually the only hosting provider I am using now. It solves all my hosting needs.,Heroku,Rackspace,10Andrew TabitAWS can be a Differentiator2013-12-19T22:21:37.075ZAWS constantly innovates and iterates, announcing new features several times per year. Earlier this year, for example, they introduced provisioned IOPS for EBS, suddenly providing us with an inexpensive solution to a performance quandary we'd been facing.
AWS has provided us with access to the product owners and architects of the products we use most. In turn, those resources provided us with visibility into the product road maps. This enabled us to improve our long-term infrastructure planning, and avoid expensive features that we'd get for free later in the year.
AWS peremptorily lowers costs a couple of times per year. This has helped us keep our bill reasonable even as we consume more and more of the AWS services. We periodically compare the cost of AWS to the cost of moving into our colo, and every year the colo looks less and less attractive.,Occasionally, we disagree with their roadmap priorities. For example, we really needed Content-Based Routing added to ELB to support our multitenant implementation. The AWS architects agreed that it was a mainstream, valuable request and hinted that they were trying to get it onto the roadmap, but 15 months later there's still no sign of it. I'm sure they have their reasons, but it's a strange and annoying hole in an otherwise invaluable service.
AWS has had well-publicized outages that have broken the promise of true zone (datacenter) isolation. This was supposed to have been impossible - if you had instances running in two zones within a region, you thought had a solid survivability story. We were forced to react by building out additional redundancy that increased costs beyond our original design estimates. AWS claims to have resolved the problem, but we haven't been confident enough to spin down the extra servers yet.
There are annoying resource limits, presumably in place to prevent hackers from allocating huge numbers of resources on a compromised account. The problem is that raising the resource limits requires manual action to be taken, and can have a severe impact on production software if your ops team isn't meticulous in checking the limits. As of the last time I checked, these limits weren't available via API, making it impossible to create alarms whenever we get close to exceeding our resource limits.
AWS is relatively infamous for their poor communications during outages. Their status page will occasionally go without an update for 45 minutes, while half your customers are dead in the water. This is - obviously - infuriating.,AWS's autoscaling capabilities allow us to automate the provisioning and deprovisioning of hardware in response to demand, allowing us in turn to lower our hosting bills and increase our margins.
AWS's APIs are comprehensive and well-designed. They have greatly assisted our devops team in the building of tools that have enabled a wide range of operational improvements, including zero-downtime upgrades which benefit our customers directly.
AWS's friendly administrative panels make it easy for developers to spin up and connect the resources they need to test prototypes and develop innovative solutions quickly. This has increased the velocity of our development team, and helped us turn around architecturally complex features very quickly.,10,9,25,2,Development - easy access to hardware and networking resources enables innovation.
QA - easy access to environments that mirror production enable on-demand testing at the feature and/or system level.
Production - sophisticated Disaster Recovery, Business Continuity, Performance and Scalability features help us meet SLAs and keep our customers happy.
Professional Services - easy access to environments that mirror customer environments enable ad hoc customization testing.,Autosizing - runtime customization of resources like IOPS and storage, combined with the ability to easily upsize and downsize a server has enabled us to build servers customized for its purpose, removing the need in many case to decide between function and cost.
AWS added the Simple Email Service (SES) shortly after we first migrated, allowing us to get rid of our mail server and all of the maintenance and support overhead that it caused.,AWS Elasticache - we are currently caching in MongoDB because it was just as fast as our old memcached server. We will probably move to elasticache soon, lightening the load on the database and - possibly - increasing performance.
CloudFront - we have not needed it yet, but the easy integration to CloudFront will be very attractive when it comes time to commit our assets to CDN.,No,,Price
Product Features
Product Usability
Product Reputation,Since I'm happy with how the process turned out, I wouldn't change much. If I were going to change anything, I'd look less at the ancillary services that we could build ourselves relatively easily, and concentrate on the core value propositions of a public cloud, which -- to my mind -- are the API and the provisioning capabilities. AWS would win anyway, but for different reasons.Marc SchriftmanAmazon Web Services (EC2)2013-07-23T20:52:44.428ZEC2 makes it very quick and efficient to launch specific "builds" of your virtual machine image, if configured.
EC2 makes it very easy to find off the shelf "builds" of specific applications and services that might meet the needs of the company.
EC2 makes it very easy to understand the status and health of your virtual machines with just a few clicks.,While the documentation is robust it is sometimes difficult to get access to an actual person who might be able to help with the design of your application and what Amazon service is most applicable.,EC2 allowed us to create an automated scaling application that monitored both the users and the tests being launched so that Janova could bring up or down workers based on the demand. This allowed us to control the cost of the monthly plan for users across all levels.
EC2 allowed us to save on operational infrastructure costs as Janova did not have to invest in hardware or support costs.,9,9,Janova utilized the EC2 platform to launch our automated software testing tool, Janova, to run automated web tests securely in the cloud.
EC2 allowed Janova to leverage the cloud capabilities to give every user the power of an extensive infrastructure without having to actually invest in one.
EC2 allowed Janova to make it possible for users to run automated tests - up to 20 times more tests in the same amount of time.,,,Implemented in-house,8,Online training
Self-taught,7,EC2 has many features that require teams to try different implementations in order to fit their needs so learning without formalized training can help, but it can also be a hindrance if teams head in the wrong direction.,No,7Brian LusenhopAWS is awesome. Love working with it.2013-11-16T21:15:17.704ZAWS provides a very easy way of "pay-as-you-go" for every service they provide. That makes it easy for any company to scale up and down as the business dictates.
AWS provides services that inter-operate with each other very well making it them very valuable, like s3 storage being used by hadoop-elastic mapreduce, or being able to notify by email service that a load is done, etc..
AWS fees are clear and easy to estimate, absolutely nothing is hidden,A lot of functionality is still accessible only with a CLI, they can be exposed to the UI/console,10,Faster time to market
Increased employee efficiency,10,10Verified UserAWS fits like a glove2014-05-17T20:29:22.344ZAs the organization transitions from an in-house to SaaS model AWS was procured for hosting certain capabilities. This early-stage effort has signaled the validity of the transition model for future applications. Results have reduced inhouse IT expenditures and provided a simplified enterprise connectivity architecture through interface standards and high-performance bus speeds.,Complete Failover and Disaster Recovery services which scale to your desired need
Several service level options from dynamic storage pricing to pre-allocated
Customer service responsiveness -- issues are resolved with a quick email or phone call rapidly,Service Availability has been ok, yet a couple large outages brought down the service for "too long"
Service Availability is worse than some competitors based on known metrics,8,The efficiency of application integration with other services has been greatly increased
Internal resources are no bogged down with custom interface challenges
IT does not need to implement and maintain the hardware infrastructure necessary to support the application,,10Verified UserAWS - This is where your cloud journey begins2014-08-23T23:25:24.392ZWe are using AWS stack as multi geography, multi cluster infrastructure to run data and compute cloud. We are using EC2, S3, SNS, SQS, ELB and Route53 as a part of our major architectural components. This infrastructure is connected via continuous integration/delivery pipeline to leverage fast, focused and frequent feature deployments.,Intuitive and easy to use
Fast ramp up for beginners
Command Line Interface (CLI) support,Still lacks openness
Data Sovereignty,7,Faster technology and tool selection process. POC to results
Disposable infrastructure gives so much liberty and flexibility to create those temporary demo environments,Google Compute Engine,8Verified UserHard to go wrong with AWS!2013-01-31T20:32:49.103ZThe development and administration tools work well, including a consistent API and adequate management console. In terms of business process, it provided an effective "escape valve" for new product development that would have been much more onerous to deploy if we had to provision physical hardware and arrange for associated IT resources.,AWS has a record of occasional severe outages, which has a cascading effect on the large number of high-profile services that now run on its infrastructure. Despite the spectacular nature of these outages, it is unlikely that a self-managed data center would achieve significantly better uptime.
It is also the case that AWS outages can be mitigated with effective use of multiple deployment 'zones' and regions. This is something that any mission-critical application should be doing anyway as part of disaster recovery preparations.,It would be difficult to quantify the ROI exactly, but it virtually eliminates capital expenditures on hardware and at least halves the need for IT labor.,8,8,50,4,It is used to host a set of custom services (built and deployed as Java web applications) to supplement a primary application that runs within the Salesforce platform.,,,Implemented in-house,10,Self-taught,It was relatively easy for a developer to learn how to use it for simple scenarios. Setting up more complex virtual infrastructure with multiple tiers, redundancy and failover is more of a challenge to to take on from scratch, but a number of companies offer support in the form of deployment templates and additional services.,Once you get to the point of configuring your machines, there is not much difference between physical and virtual. You still need to maintain the operating system, configure networking, etc.,No,5,9,9,,Salesforce,No.,,We did not negotiate.Verified UserAWS in a startup environment from a non-developer's perspective2013-05-23T14:43:02.414ZScalability- Can expand from a few servers to hundreds or thousands quickly, and without long term commitments.
Pay as you go- If you need 10,000 servers to crunch through a problem overnight, AWS is the way to do it.
Variety of services- from basic computing with EC2, to specialized database, storage, and routing platforms AWS is designed to work well together and provide a full feature set to both growing startups and mature organizations.,Amazon will nickel and dime you to a great degree-- their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform charges not only for server run time, but for I/O, bandwidth (none is included in the per hour fee), storage, IP addresses, etc. While most of this is expected, the bill at the end of the month is sometimes a rather unpleasant surprise.
While I'll admit I'm not a developer, the platform can be unforgiving to those not used to an enterprise server environment (pretty easy to accidentally delete mission-critical data),Decreased complexity of communications chain between company and clients, no more hunting for a file in an email.,8,6Verified User
Unspecified
Amazon Web Services
381 Ratings
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