Item: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Amazon EC2 to host our internal apps for data engineering. We self-manage our own Apache Airflow installation on an EC2 instance. Amazon EC2 gives us a way to provide the necessary computing infrastructure for our data integration pipelines. It's also very convenient to resize Amazon EC2 to handle our ever-increasing workloads due to larger volumes of data as our company's app usage grows exponentially.

Pros and Cons

On-demand usage and pricing
Scale CPU, memory, and disk up or down easily
Firewall and security features

Scale-up CPU and memory separately
Manage SSH keys via web console
Faster start and stop times

Return on Investment

We're able to self-host open-source apps for just the price of a t3.micro instance, instead of paying for expensive per-user SaaS licenses.
Amazon EC2 saves us time from planning how many resources to provision since we can always resize our EC2 instances.
Amazon EC2's monitoring features also save us time when troubleshooting issues.

Alternatives Considered

Google Compute Engine, Heroku Platform and Google App Engine

Amazon EC2 is super flexible compared to the PaaS offerings like Heroku Platform and Google App Engine since with Amazon EC2, we have access to the terminal. In terms of pricing, it's basically just the same as Google Compute Engine. The deciding factor is Amazon EC2's native integration with other AWS services since they're all in the same cloud platform.

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

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Amazon Redshift

Likelihood to Recommend

I think nowadays, Amazon EC2 is best-suited for most app development and deployment use cases, especially if your resource requirements are not fixed over a long period of time. The flexibility provided by the on-demand pricing and rescaling option makes Amazon EC2 a great service, especially if your tech stack already runs on AWS. On the other hand, I think Amazon EC2 is not the best option if your tech infrastructure runs on another public cloud.

Great cloud service for flexible compute workloads

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)