It scales – if you know what you're doing
July 28, 2017
It scales – if you know what you're doing
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
We use EC2 and a host of related products to serve up 2 of our 3 SAAS products. EC2 gives us the ability to spin up servers around the world and tightly integrate with other AWS services like RDS and S3. Perhaps the most useful feature of EC2 is the ability to relatively easily create autoscaling clusters of servers to serve your products.
- 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.
- Overall, EC2 and other AWS tools are not as cheap as they appear at first. So ROI may be a little lower than expected, but we probably couldn't have built the products we have without it.
- It takes a really long time to become proficient in their tools. That is a real cost.
- You simply cannot use EC2 by itself. Using it effectively requires a host of other AWS tools, those all have a cost that needs to be taken into account.
If you want to scale your product very far, AWS is the tool to use – no doubt. It takes a lot longer to use than other products and is not trivial to use, but I have confidence my products can scale to meet the demands of millions of people with AWS. I do not have the same confidence in the scaling capabilities of any other host I have ever used.