Item: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Rating: 9
Author: Frank Troglauer

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We primarily use AWS EC2 instances to host our websites and web applications on both production and development servers. It is mainly used by our web and app development departments but impacts the entire organization. It saves the company money by offering a wide variety of server options and the ability to scale the server size up and down quickly, and at our discretion.

Pros and Cons

It is possible to create automated backup schedules so your servers will be backed up with less tweaking and work from employees. It is also super quick to restore those backups if necessary. Finally, they back up the server in an efficient manner so you don't have redundant sized backups, but rather just backups of the files changed over the period of time you make the backups.
The ability to launch instances of any size and then change the size later is incredibly useful and has saved us both time and money in multiple instances. For example, we launched a large instance to make sure we had enough power for an application we launched and later we realized it didn't need as much power so we just turned the instance off and changed the instance type and turned it back on and started saving money!

The ability to create snapshots of instances is fantastic. We have had some issues launching new instances from snapshots and being unable to access the instance for some reason. It wasn't ever fully resolved but we found our own workarounds.

Return on Investment

As stated earlier in my review it saves us money by being able to change instance types/sizes at will, so your not locked in and don't have to physically move files to a different server.