Item: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Rating: 8
Author: Patrick Plaisance

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) both internally for virtual machines for both production and testing, and for clients' virtual machines for both production and testing. Being able to spin up virtual machines on the fly with no major infrastructure investment and for minimal startup cost was a complete game-changer for our business.

Pros and Cons

Low-impact virtual servers. If you need a server that consumes very little resources/disk space, EC2 is extremely economical.
Testing. Spinning up an EC2 virtual machine to test applications, services, etc is invaluable.

Dealing with small businesses, the recurring cost of a high-performance EC2 instance (or one requiring a ton of S3 storage) might be more than an on-premise server for the same task.
Even with the AWS cost calculator, it can be difficult to accurately estimate the recurring cost of EC2 instances.

Return on Investment

Positive: cost savings by deploying small servers via EC2 vs expense of an on-premise server.
Positive: cost savings by being able to spin up virtual testing labs on the fly.

Alternatives Considered

Azure Container Instances and Azure Virtual Machines

We have been using EC2 for so much longer, that even though we use Azure's other features and services more then the equivalent AWS features and services, we don't usually go for Azure's VM offerings first over EC2. I guess that that means this recommendation is mostly based on familiarity but since EC2 works so well, we have very little reason to stray.

Support Rating

AWS's support is good overall. Not outstanding, but better than average. We have had very little reason to engage with AWS support but in our limited experience, the staff has been knowledgeable, timely and helpful. The only negative is actually initiating a service request can be a bit of a pain.

Key Insights

Do you think Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)'s feature set?

Yes

Did Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Azure Container Instances, Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Virtual Network, Azure Virtual WAN, Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), Amazon Route 53, Amazon Web Services, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)

Likelihood to Recommend

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is extremely useful for small virtual servers. For instance, we use EC2 instances for inexpensive unifi cloud controllers. Additionally, we often use EC2 instances for testing various applications and server configurations. We can spin up an entire lab, virtual servers, workstations, etc and test out a client-server application in hours and at very little expense.

The de facto standard cloud VM host

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)