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Amazon Web Services EC2. Not cheap, but a great option.
January 19, 2018

Amazon Web Services EC2. Not cheap, but a great option.

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

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

I have used AWS to provide web infrastructure including load balancing, databases, web servers, and content distribution. It's great for this because it offers so many tools without having to pay the up-front cost of deploying them. You pay for what you use. That does not mean it's cheap, but at least it's accessible. The speed of deployment is also a benefit.
  • Very helpful tech support
  • Fast deployment of all offered services
  • Wide array of services offered
  • The virtual desktop service is not the industry standard replacement for hardware desktops that you'd expect.
  • Once you define VPC subnets, you can't go back and modify them.
  • No read replica support for MS SQL RDS instances.
  • The pay as you go nature is easier on the budget than big up front investments.
  • The speed of deployment allows for much faster turnaround times on projects.
  • The tech support is great and allows projects to run smoothly when issues are encountered.
I have minimal experience with AWS alternatives. I used Azure for a short time, but found the console to be confusing. The number of services offered was also much smaller.
AWS is well suited for most uses. Even if you have a preference for specific vendor hardware, there are often virtual appliances offered within AWS. BigIP F5 load balancers for example. If you need to be up and running relatively quickly, including the ability to quickly make changes to your environment, AWS is great. It's also great in that you can grow into it and its many many services. However, it is not cheap by any means.