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Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services

Overview

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.

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Recent Reviews

Great for remote access desktops

9 out of 10
November 04, 2022
I use AWS to access a remote desktop which I require to access Microsoft-based applications that I need for my day to day use. It was a …
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AWSome

10 out of 10
December 28, 2021
Incentivized
We have a product that is a distributed system, SaaS on AWS. We use Route53 to register our domain and configure subdomains. We use EC2 to …
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Do NOT use AWS

1 out of 10
November 29, 2021
Domain registration for my small business. AWS system, processes, and staff cause me to lose money and they did not take responsibility …
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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
  • Security controls (65)
    9.3
    93%
  • Monitoring tools (64)
    9.1
    91%
  • Dynamic scaling (64)
    9.1
    91%
  • Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime (63)
    8.8
    88%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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Free Tier

$0

Cloud
per month

Basic Environment

$100 - $200

Cloud
per month

Intermediate Environment

$250 - $600

Cloud
per month

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.clickittech.com/aws/aws…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Starting price (does not include set up fee)

  • $100 per month
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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

8.9
Avg 8.1
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Product Details

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. According to Amazon, AWS is suitable for organizations of any size, and helps to efficiently power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. AWS is also known for its service coverage, with over 69 Availability Zones across the world, allowing for users to experience lower latency and prevent their data centers from failing, which is important for cloud computing services.

AWS product range covers, but is not necessarily limited to, the following categories:

  • Analytics

  • Application Integration

  • AR & VR

  • AWS Cost Management

  • Blockchain

  • Business Applications

  • Compute

  • Customer Engagement

  • Database

  • Developer Tools

  • End User Computing

  • Game Tech

  • Internet of Things

  • Machine Learning

  • Management & Governance

  • Media Services

  • Migration & Transfer

  • Mobile

  • Networking & Content Delivery

  • Robotics

  • Satellite

  • Security, Identity, & Compliance

  • Storage

Pricing varies greatly across their vast scope of products, but AWS does provide an “AWS Free Tier” offering of services. Depending on the product, users can use the product for free indefinitely, a year, or in shorter-term trials.


Amazon Web Services Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Amazon Web Services starts at $100.

DXC Managed Cloud Services, 9STAR EasyIdentity Cloud, and 9STAR Elastic SSO are common alternatives for Amazon Web Services.

Reviewers rate Elastic load balancing and Security controls highest, with a score of 9.3.

The most common users of Amazon Web Services are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(692)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(26-50 of 79)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Easy to use even for beginners.
  • Free tier for 1 year with access to most offerings.
  • Pay only what you use model.
  • Helpful & quick real-time support.
  • Highly reliable and fault tolerant.
  • Due to the various services provided, it can become a maze for beginners.
  • If not monitored and managed carefully, huge bill can pile up.
  • For larger scale applications using AWS becomes expensive, better to go for on-premise servers.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Besides planned maintenance windows, there are no interruption to the services provided.
  • Great variety of applications ready to be deployed.
  • Fees could be higher than competitor.
  • We experienced failure and performance issues at least once in the past years., although it is getting better through the years.
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • The technology is great. I've never had technical issues.
  • They have been incredibly slow to respond to a billing dispute. Over a year ago, we erroneously signed up for a service that we never used. It was a total 'gotcha,' and it added $800/mo to our monthly invoices. Shortly thereafter we noticed the huge credit card bill and asked them to remove the service. We're a small education company, and we're spread pretty thin- and I'm embarrassed to admit that when I asked them to turn it off, I naively believed that they would do so. When we noticed last month that they were still auto-billing us $800/mo for the entire past year, we were stunned. I again asked for them to honor our original, well-documented request, and this time we asked them to help make things right for us. We've corresponded 2-3 times/week over the last 30 days and I still can't get a response from their Finance department. I'm surprised and disappointed - I was expecting AWS to be much more responsive and helpful than this. I still trust that they'll make things right - but as of now they're still billing us for this.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • AWS provides enterprise fail over capabilities at a reasonable cost.
  • It's extremely easy to scale up or down with your infrastructure.
  • Better UI design and layout.
  • It could get expensive if not managed correctly.
January 15, 2020

My AWS experience

Zakarieya Abderoef | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Innovation. Since AWS is a world leader, we are able to benefit from running on the latest technologies being deployed using best practices and industry standards that typically comes standard from these leading cloud service providers.
  • Scalability. There is basically no limitation in expanding system resources when using AWS. The advantage of this is that we can increase resources for business systems and projects at a click of a button.
  • Implementation. Migrating to AWS is somewhat complex and adequate training is required. However, this can be mitigated using an accredited AWS provider.
  • Support Costs. AWS has various support options which includes Developer, Business and Enterprise support. Depending on the business requirement, the support costs can increase significantly since the basic support option may not meet the requirement of certain businesses.
Devendra Parhate | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Cloudformation to bring up infrastructure.
  • Using triggers like S3 file creation to invoke lambda automatically.
  • EMR service allows the use of Big data tools seamlessly.
  • Amazon Web Services team support for debugging cluster related issues.
  • Handling Cloudformation stack deletion gracefully while the EMR Cluster is scaling.
  • Providing free access to Amazon Web Services to graduate students.
  • Educating users using blogs like https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/best-practices-for-successfully-managing-memory-for-apache-spark-applications-on-amazon-emr/.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • The interface is pretty easy to use.
  • It's very reliable and there almost never seems to be an interruption in service.
  • It's pretty pervasive so when working with other companies, partners, etc, it is a piece of technology that nearly everyone is familiar with.
  • Occasionally I've had issues uploading many files at once, and have to resort to one-at-a-time to ensure successful upload. Not often, but it's happened.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • We like the native AWS RBAC authorization tools for controlling access without having to add other layers of complexity.
  • We like the robustness and simplicity of S3 storage services and the related APIs.
  • The ability to quickly provision and manage complex computing environments is 2nd to none in the industry.
  • Like any suite of applications they could benefit from having a team of usability experts make the products more intuitive.
  • Like most cloud solutions they could make it easier to understand the total costs associated with the various feature sets and related constraints.
  • Customer service in the technical support area could be improved - they could use a bit more of a personal touch at times.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • AWS has a very in-depth and descriptive dashboard that helps to chargeback easily as well as keep track of expenses.
  • It is also highly reliable and scales well with workloads.
  • It is very well suited for a multi-cloud set-up since it is compatible with and supports other public clouds ( Oracle, Google, Microsoft).
  • AWS dashboard is complex and it needs someone with reasonable experience with Cloud deployment and maintenance to use. AWS can reduce the complexity of the AWS console to make it more user-friendly.
  • AWS is also much more expensive and the license metrics are not that well aligned for extremest scale workloads.
  • There is a good amount of install and deployment time using if you are using Oracle database or even Microsoft SQL Server as best practices documents for large scale deployments over AWS is not that easily available.
September 26, 2019

AWS: short for Awesome

Ryan Hart, MBA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • AWS is very cost-effective, costing far less than 1% of our revenue.
  • AWS is very reliable, with the services we use being in the 4-11 9s SLA.
  • AWS is very scalable, with the services being on-demand and growing with us as we need them.
  • AWS doesn’t offer the same level of end-to-end software that Azure offers.
  • S3 individual transactions can be expensive. AWS charges for transactions in addition to storage.
  • EC2 instance controls are limited to one option. EC2 allows users to deploy dedicated hosts but they must declare an instance type. Each instance per host must be uniform that requires users to specify configurations like RAM, CPU, and bandwidth requirements.
Martha Batruny | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • What I like in it, is its simple notification service which provides a mobile messaging feature to enable push messaging to my mobile devices as well.
  • It helps in sending out notifications to all my teammates with full integrity.
  • Responsive Support.
  • Offers a variety of features that help to manage my workload.
  • It is a bit costly when compared to other tools.
  • This application has great integration power, which enables me to work on different applications, simultaneously. This suits me well.
  • It is playing a significant role in our company.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • AWS allows us to scale up (or down) depending on our busy season. Our software has fairly predictable "busy" seasons, so this allows us to properly spend on infrastructure based on needs.
  • EBS Snapshots allow us to create in-time based backups. We use these as part of our DRP/BCP.
  • Understanding the AWS bill is very confusing. Sometimes it is nearly impossible to track what charges are for which particular service is using which feature.
  • The ability to tag all items, including Marketplace items for cost usage report would be especially useful. The cost usage report being more detailed when filtering by usage and cost allocation tags would also be exceptionally helpful.
July 18, 2019

Serverless Saviors!

Denzel Robinson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • It is highly redundant.
  • You can design performance capable infrastructure at up to 80% cheaper than other services.
  • You can configure your routing based on latency, geo-location, weighted, etc.
  • Menu to access different services is a bit muddled. It could use some streamlining.
  • Interactive and informative training should be offered by Amazon, rather than third party services.
  • Availability zones differ between accounts.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Serverless services remove overhead from IT department.
  • Diversity of services. Anything you need, it is there.
  • Support through official channels or even through unofficial ones helps you never get stuck on anything.
  • Mobile app for AWS console is very limited.
  • Site-to-site VPNs provide no logs for troubleshooting.
  • Grub access in VMs would be nice.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Easy to deploy. It's trivial to create a new S3 bucket, or spin up a new EC2 VM.
  • AWS console is relatively easy to navigate/administrate services. It used to not be the case, but it has improved quite a bit over the years.
  • Cost Explorer service makes it somewhat easier to plan/budget and track/manage AWS cost.
  • Tons of software, services, etc that integrate directly with AWS services -- example, CloudBerry Backup that integrates with S3, Glacier, etc.
  • Cost - Because of the many variables involved in AWS pricing, it can be difficult to budget for AWS costs. For small deployments, this isn't too big of a problem, but when you start using multiple AWS services, even with Cost Explorer, planning can be time-consuming.
  • Some of the terminologies are unnecessary. Too much input from marketing types. They should just say what the service does and note waste time with cutesy names.
  • On the flip side of the thriving AWS ecosystem, the lack of Amazon-created apps to interface with their services is a bit of a bummer. Sometimes you just want a good, documented, first-party backup app, for example.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • The ability to scale instances to optimized cost and performance.
  • Monitoring hardware issues and automatically migrating instances to new hardware when necessary.
  • Cloudwatch alerting allows monitoring of systems 24/7.
  • There are a lot of great services that are only available in the US zone and we would like to use them in Canada.
Nathan Sichilongo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • AWS (Amazon Web Services) is not the easiest virtual service to set up but once you get the hang of it, it's fairly easy to install new instances (servers) and stop them. This is good for multiple reasons e.g we run multiple tests and live production servers for our different services. When we are done with one we can easily turn it off. The cost of the specifications on our virtual servers is only a fraction of the cost of what we would get locally or even on most traditional web services companies.
  • Amazon Web Services can be relatively cost efficient depending on where you are coming from. For our smaller organization, we felt the cost was worth it as other alternatives were not as affordable. The good thing with AWS is you only pay for what you use. If you want S3 (Simple Storage Service), you can pay for that. If you want to run a compute engine, EC2 can be paid for. At the end of the month, you get one bill based on your usage.
  • Because of our size as a company, AWS was easier to deploy compared to local dedicated solutions. All we had to do was take our development team through a simple 2-day course to get them on board. The ease of deployment means that we do not have to hire a specialist to deploy servers for us.
  • If there is one thing I think AWS needs improvement on, it is the administration dashboard. It can be a nightmare to use especially when trying to access billing. This could be made better, honestly, as there should be a simplified way to access simple admin features.
  • While AWS was fairly easy to integrate into our solutions, it is not as easy to use without some IT knowledge. The dashboards are complicated and designed for someone who is computer savvy. If you are just want to keep track of billing, for example, you may need to take a course or spend a few hours with someone being walked through the admin console.
  • AWS does tend to be slow at times. If you do not have a fast internet connection, it can take time to access services that are hosted on AWS. This is not always the case but we have had clients complain about this if they are trying to access a service from multiple points (IP addresses). The only real fix we found was to make our files cache to another server and only keep current data accessible to clients.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Launching a VIrtual Machine quickly, especially from AMI images from verified providers.
  • Launching RDS instances, configuring and managing parameters
  • Managing monthly costs and budget
  • Some resources parameters needed and prerequisites are difficult to understand, even with services that have well-known solutions that are easy to understand. For example, IAM and SSO solutions are more complicated and confusing than other services.
  • Generally, the User Experience is lacking WITHIN services is poor compared to other comparable platforms, however high-level access to the many services in AWS is good - as compared to other platforms.
  • Some services seem fragmented - as interrelated functions withing services don't seem to provide detail weel without some work. The billing area is an example of where getting and reviewing information is difficult.
Jackie Bassett | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Customer service: There's no beating AWS for their customer service. They've clearly been trained to lisetn to understand the core issue you've called them for. Our customers satisfaction is in direct correlation to what AWS can deliver, so this is the #1 reason we chose and have stayed with AWS for 8 years.
  • Agility: We have demand cycles that fluctuate, largely without alot of notice. It doesn't take more than 1 phone call to address any increase in bandwidth. In fact, they're more likely to reach out to us with any enhancements we might need or shoul be considering.
  • Performance: We've never experienced a slowdown, nor failure - even when there've been internet-wide issues. They're always innovating based on every customer, and we all benefit from Bezos vision of what infrastructure technology should do for business.
  • It's such a well conceived service, I can't think of anything that's missing in functionality for our HC company. What we ask of AWS is to be so reliable, so customer-focused and so fast that we can just do what we do best, and forget about their job in our success.
  • Healthcare: Since this is our core market, we're very interested in watching this vertical evolve and Amazon's vision for it. We'd value more insights and collaboration with Bezos on what our vision is too.
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