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EC2 great for legacy, meh for everything else.
March 14, 2017

EC2 great for legacy, meh for everything else.

Anatoly Geyfman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

I've used EC2 for both personal projects, as well as evaluation for moving my company's infrastructure to EC2. I used EC2 for hosting a pretty standard Node/Mongo/Angular/Nginx application. In EC2 we put up a few servers - the API was on one, along with Angular, mongo was a second server and the nginx server served as a proxy. We chose EC2 because it was simple to get up and running and we already have experience w/ it.
  • 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.
  • Sustained usage discounts help w/ total cost of cloud infrastructure.
  • Tricky to figure out exact cost of infrastructure due to so many pricing levels (based on sustained usage).
We ended up not selecting EC2, we chose Google Compute Engine instead. Reason for us choosing GCE was due to:
  1. Ability to define custom compute units in GCE.
  2. More transparent pricing due to automatic usage discounts.
  3. Less expensive for equal compute unit classes.
  4. Better UX of the administration and console.
AWS is great when you have a very specific legacy environment that you need to "cloud-enable". I think there are better options for non-legacy teams.
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.