Item: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Rating: 10
Author: Michael Weisel

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Amazon EC2 is being used by our entire company in multiple locations across three countries. We reply on EC2 instances for all of our day-to-day tasks on both the front-end and the back-end. We migrated all of our services from brick-and-mortar data centers to our AWS EC2 instances. It's saved us money, time, and resources while providing a much more efficient and stable environment. It also affords us the ability to scale up and or down our environment without laying out hard costs for equipment.

Pros and Cons

Saves Money
Creates Efficiencies
Easy to Setup
Easy to Manage

Minor improvements to the EC2 User Interface

Return on Investment

Saved us money on quickly outdated servers
Clear and concise billing so we understand our bill each month
Incredible and flexible service plans
Ability to scale when needed both up and down
Ability to setup new instances quickly

Alternatives Considered

Vultr Bare Metal and Linode

We tried a few other competitors on the web hosting side of our company and ultimately decided to go with AWS EC2 instances. AWS had the most flexibility, the most choices for different types of instances, a variety of Operating Systems, an incredible infrastructure across multiple regions, and top-notch service/support ready to help with anything 24 hours a day. It also had the services that we needed across its other offerings that we were able to pair with our EC2 instances to create efficient cost-saving network infrastructure.

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

Zoho Analytics (formerly Zoho Reports), Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365), Cloudways

Likelihood to Recommend

With a solid plan, we were able to migrate from our physical servers to our EC2 environment much easier than we had anticipated. Once migrated we found even more use cases for EC2 instances including consolidating services into smaller more efficient and cost-effective instances. Because there are so many choices of EC2 instances, we were able to tailor our environment and test different instances before settling. This also afforded us the flexibility of firing up a quick instance when needed and turning it down when we've completed our task. We have some instances that we use once a month that are all set up and ready to go when we need them.

Highly Recommend AWS's EC2 Instances

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)