1. Home
  2. Infrastructure-as-a-Service Solutions
  3. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Reviews
  4. User Review of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
EC2 - often better to buy direct
August 31, 2018

EC2 - often better to buy direct

Ryan MacGillivray | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Generally, I've seen EC2 used by the entire company as I've worked mostly in environments where there were only other Software Engineers making up the bulk of the company.

It frequently addressed the issue of having reliable web servers or virtual machines without having to actually acquire physical servers, rely on resellers of the service or deal with other providers who I've had technical issues with in the past.
  • Variety of sizes, you can fine-tune your instance quite a lot rather than being tied into specific tiers like some resellers offer.
  • Easy to provision, either using an Amazon tool or AMI, Terraform and/or Ansible I've found it easy to get set up and going on a new EC2 instance.
  • With the rise of tools such as Ansible it would be good to see AWS provide similar standardised tooling for EC2.
  • When I first was involved in shifting from physical servers to EC2 we saw an initial saving of around 80% a month; previously we had been paying in excess of £1000 per server per month and had 3 servers.
Heroku: Really they are an AWS reseller. This can make the initial setup a lot easier but means that you can be limited when it comes to wanting to integrate with other AWS services that they haven't implemented as yet.

Linode: Very similar virtual cloud provider, but found that they would frequently have large technical issues or outages and be unable to explain what had happened which did not build trust.
I've found that while EC2 and AWS might mean initially more setup than purchasing compute resources through a reseller it makes life much easier down the line as you have more control over your instances and other resources. This also ends up that it will cost more dev time up front but less money in comparison.

It's also possible to fine-tune your AWS spending whereas I've found this difficult with AWS resellers in the past.