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EC2 -- take your QA and scaling woes to the cloud!
October 17, 2017

EC2 -- take your QA and scaling woes to the cloud!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

EC2 is being used to host both development/testing and production instances of small-scale web applications (<3000 users). These applications vary in engine (Node, PHP, Python, etc.) and EC2 gives us a flexible, project-agnostic platform to deploy and test upon.

We use EC2 to pull down current master copies of our code for QA as well as reference tagged versions for our production clusters.
  • Cheap -- just about the cheapest you can get out of any options on the market
  • CLI administration makes setup and maintenance a breeze -- version controllable dev infrastructure without the overhead of made-for-purpose infra VCS services is great
  • Flexible authentication systems -- Amazon goes above and beyond to handle complex security arrangements well
  • Well organized web UI
  • Low level networking support is minimal but getting better
  • EBS outages hurt, and I haven't been thrilled with reliability in previous months (it's been better since, though)
  • Latency for storage and instance provisioning can be frustrating while the tech is in the gap between provisioning that takes minutes vs. instant provisioning (waiting 30 secs - 1 minute for storage to provision, for example)
  • Saved time in training because of its wide usage -- new teams don't need long to be spun up on it
  • QA is much more consistent -- we pass around instance names now rather than weird VPS addresses with convoluted user names and access schemes
  • We can put the beef in our web app capacity when we need it and out when we don't; this saves thousands in scaling costs
EC2 is awesome if your prime need is scalability -- the "elastic" component of Elastic Compute is really what makes this a win. The ability to scale right up with the click of a button means that provisioning new instances to handle surges in production traffic or creating lots of test beds for the QA team is where your money is well spent. If you don't anticipate peaky traffic or find yourself with very static machine needs, simply provisioning a few instances by hand in the other non-EC2 parts of AWS is probably better -- you might even just consider a couple VPSs.