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Highly recommend cloud computing instances like EC2
August 31, 2018

Highly recommend cloud computing instances like EC2

James Hilton | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

We use it for dev instances, staging instances and production instances for the whole organization. We automatically spin up instances as needed, automatically configure the settings and software we need, and it's ready to go in seconds. Prior to this we used managed hosting which caused too many problems with bad customer support and limited access to the servers preventing us from solving our own problems with bugs and scaling.
  • Full control over the software and settings.
  • Instant availability of a new server with the power you require.
  • Thorough permission support to ensure only those who have the rights to monitor or configure the servers can do so.
  • Many world wide locations to make sure it's closer to the country your users are in.
  • Huge learning curve. To get a basic instance up with default settings is very easy, but there's hundreds or perhaps thousands of settings without explanations of what they do.
  • Multiple ways to do the same thing, like the browser console, the command line, and APIs, means finding answers on how to do something may be provided only in one way and not the way you have to do it.
  • Lack of documentation on best practices in many scenarios. AWS assumes you have devops experience and makes it too easy for you to make mistakes and follow bad practices.
  • It allowed us to solve our scaling issues that the managed service wouldn't help with, but introduced more as we learned how to use it and made mistakes.
  • Allowed us to be more effective as a dev team by having new servers readily available for working on and testing.
  • It has cost more because we use more resources now than when we had managed hosting.
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB
It's great when you need a web site or service up and running immediately with specific settings and software. It's great when you need to scale it within minutes and only pay for the time that the extra power is used. It's not so great when you want to learn how everything works and the documentation is difficult to find or worded differently or out dated because things seem to change every year or two on AWS but the documentation lags a little behind.