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EC2: The trusty virtualization choice
April 05, 2018

EC2: The trusty virtualization choice

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

We use EC2 to run all of our .NET and Python application software. It is used by my engineering team as well as various other engineering teams that are running their workloads on AWS. EC2 allows us to have granular control over our hardware as well as gives us the flexibility to change the hardware and scale in/out based on demand. This helps us control our costs and invest when we need to support a spike in usage.
  • Auto scaling
  • Runs Linux
  • Supports security groups
  • EC2 console is hard to navigate, UI could be better
  • EC2 pricing per hour could be made better for windows applications
  • EC2 hardware specs should be available when selecting an instance, vs having to research what you're buying
  • Positive ROI on opex costs
  • Reserved instance pricing locks you in for 1-3 years, so you have to be careful to plan your capacity when you do this
  • Overall we are able to scale our applications on demand without operational staff with EC2 autoscaling
  • digital ocean, google cloud and azure
We chose EC2 over Azure because our tech stack was already invested in AWS. Documentation is better, and there is more community support for AWS services. EC2 is the pioneer in virtualization and we wanted to go with the stability of AWS. As far as pricing goes, EC2 can be cheaper depending on when rate cuts are made. Overall the industry is shedding costs and each cloud provider is catching up, so while cost is a factor, it is more important that your application stack is designed to run in AWS and on EC2 appropriately.
EC2 is suited for cloud native applications where you want to run your workloads. If you have a Linux or Windows application EC2 will likely suffice. You need to design your applications to run in a cloud environment as running a monolithic lift and shift type of application on EC2 will likely cause your application to break or incur unnecessary costs. EC2 is one of the oldest AWS services and is heavily supported and tested. It is up to you how you manage your servers to scale out or in. EC2 is just a box and you need to tell it what to do.

EC2 can get expensive if you don't need to run the system all the time. There are better options like Lambda and serverless technologies that may end up being cheaper and easier to deploy.