EC2 From the view of a medium sized company
August 29, 2018
EC2 From the view of a medium sized company
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
EC2 is currently being utilized by the IT department to extend our DMZ capabilities. Our corporate location is located deep in the woods, and connection with the outside world can be tenuous. EC2 allows our small company to sit servers on world class hardware in prime locations, granting our customers speed and reliability we wouldn't otherwise be able to offer.
- Extremely quick instance deployment, with flexible billing options.
- EC2 allows you to modify an instance on the fly, upgrading and downgrading a system based on the utilization.
- The library of prebuilt images is larger then I've seen with any other cloud provider.
- Billing is complex and can fluctuate month to month.
- There is a ton of documentation available on their website, however complex concepts like IAM account management don't have enough. While I believe they have done a good job with their documentation, there is just so much in the AWS world that is unique, the job isn't finished yet.
- There is no console access for instances, you need to connect via services like ssh or rdp. This makes troubleshooting boot issues needlessly complex.
- EC2 Snapshots can't be scheduled from inside the control panel. You need to run EC2 tools on a local computer to manage your snapshots.
- EC2 has helped us decrease the cost related to our web facing services.
- Uptime has been fantastic, providing constant service for our customers.
- The options available for sizing of instances has allowed us to pay for the power we require, without loading our servers up with stats we don't need.
We selected EC2 because of the maturity of the platform, the ease of deployment and the completeness of Amazon's vision. EC2 by itself, stacks up rather evenly with the competition. Where AWS as a whole excels is in the integration. While you may start with EC2 instances, the fantastic DB management of RDS makes managment of active databases significantly easier, Route52 DNS is cheap and works well, but their best additional services would have to be the variety of storage options.