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EC2 - a solid, featureful, and proven cloud offering that you can trust
August 30, 2017

EC2 - a solid, featureful, and proven cloud offering that you can trust

Will Stern | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

We use several dozen EC2 instances for immutable/disposable infrastructure that Docker containers can run on top of. We currently use it in several departments in addition to a private data center, but greatly favor EC2 and are in the process of moving data center servers over to EC2.The price we pay for EC2 is made up because we need less staff managing the infrastructure that we run.
  • Stability is a big key of EC2 - it does what it says it does every time.
  • Flexibility is great for EC2. You can spin up instances from a standard image (e.g. Ubuntu), your own AMI built from CI (unique AMIs for each deployment), or one of the 80k+ of community AMIs.
  • Ability to run instances in your own Virtual Private Cloud - a MUST for many larger organizations.
  • Tremendous security options.
  • Compared to several newer cloud providers (e.g. DigitalOcean), EC2 instances create and destroy very slowly. This is generally not an issue, but can be for some.
  • AWS is incredibly featureful, and therefore, not the most simple of services to learn.
  • AWS is slowly upgrading their UI, which is helpful. It's a little behind other UIs, but not too bad.
  • After moving to EC2, we've been able to lower infrastructure staff by attrition (not replacing them as they leave), since it takes fewer people to manage EC2 instances than a data center.
  • Developers are able to be significantly more involved in infrastructure and troubleshooting as EC2 instances are much more accessible to them when it comes to troubleshooting production issues.
  • Disposable EC2 instances means much fewer production problems. If a server is acting odd, we destroy it and replace it.
With twice the years of experience the army of features that AWS brings to the table, it's hard to go wrong with AWS. If you run windows server or strongly need a hybrid cloud partial-on-premises solution, then Azure might be a better fit for you. If lowest-possible-budget is important and you don't need the large-scale security features, then cheaper solutions like Digitalocean are more appropriate.
The larger the company, the better AWS seems to fit. The 2 primary reasons for this are price and security features. For more budget-focused startups, there are significantly cheaper solutions out there with far fewer security features. Mid-sized to enterprise level companies, however, will require the AWS security features if they are to authorize the use of cloud computing instances over in-house data centers.