Comprehensive offering with amazing tie in with the AWS Ecosystem
December 19, 2017
Comprehensive offering with amazing tie in with the AWS Ecosystem
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
We started using Amazon EC2 as a part of a bigger push by our organization to shift our datacenters to Cloud with Amazon being our choice of providers. It is being used by our entire organization, but our team used EC2 to host Neo4J. The EC2 addresses the problem of managed infrastructure. We added additional scripts to create and maintain the backups of Neo4J database using the EC2 snapshot service.
- Great variety, there are different classes of EC2 instances that fit various purposes.
- Robust integration with rest of Amazon ecosystems using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
- Ability to customize the instances at OS level.
- Snapshot backup service. Since the production database with 50GB of data needs to be backed up with minimal downtime, we relied on the EC2 snapshot service for storing backups and it was a breeze. With about a minute downtime every day, we now have tested, reliable backups that would not have been possible otherwise.
- Ability to add different volumes to the EC2 instance. This ties in with the previous point of adding a separate high speed SSD data volume for storing data and backing up that volume on a day to day basis.
- Docker style templates for EC2 instances, where the installation, backup and rest of the scripts come out of the box.
- Ran into a couple of issues while trying to reboot the EC2 instances, doing reboot on the instance through CLI caused data issues on the system. That needs to be ironed out.
- Costs need to be competitive with rest of the market. Found that EC2's are a lot more expensive than its competitors. So if you are tied into the Amazon ecosystem, then EC2 makes sense, but if you are looking for silo EC2 instances, look elsewhere for cost saving.
- Positive impact, because we could setup the instances and automate the backups using the Snapshot service. With about 1 min of downtime every morning, we were able to backup the instance using automated script.
- With great flexibility comes steep learning curve, we had to spend considerable time getting up to speed with the way EC2's are setup and how to tweak the instance for optimal performance. Wish Amazon offers prebuilt templates for things like this instead of using Docker over EC2.
- Overall I would consider this a very good investment.
- DigitalOcean and Heroku
DigitalOcean and Heroku are two other leading competitors to the EC2 in terms of the type of instances they offer.
Digital Ocean:
Their Droplet service is equivalent to EC2 instance.
Their droplet's offer a low cost, no non-sense alternative to EC2. They are geared more towards hobby/student developers with limited options at considerably lower cost compared to EC2. The reason we choose EC2 is because rest of the ecosystem is tied in with AWS.
Heroku:
Its geared towards the same crowd as DigitalOcean but they offer a wider suite of applications similar to the AWS offerings. The Heroic shines in offering build packs that recognize the type of application automatically and take care of deployments. The reason we picked EC2 apart from the AWS tie in is because last time I checked, I didn't find Heroku suitable for setting up Databases.
Digital Ocean:
Their Droplet service is equivalent to EC2 instance.
Their droplet's offer a low cost, no non-sense alternative to EC2. They are geared more towards hobby/student developers with limited options at considerably lower cost compared to EC2. The reason we choose EC2 is because rest of the ecosystem is tied in with AWS.
Heroku:
Its geared towards the same crowd as DigitalOcean but they offer a wider suite of applications similar to the AWS offerings. The Heroic shines in offering build packs that recognize the type of application automatically and take care of deployments. The reason we picked EC2 apart from the AWS tie in is because last time I checked, I didn't find Heroku suitable for setting up Databases.