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Hard to go wrong with AWS!
January 31, 2013

Hard to go wrong with AWS!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review

Software Version

Several

Modules Used

  • EC2
  • Simple Email Service
  • Route 53
  • S3

Overall Satisfaction

  • The development and administration tools work well, including a consistent API and adequate management console. In terms of business process, it provided an effective "escape valve" for new product development that would have been much more onerous to deploy if we had to provision physical hardware and arrange for associated IT resources.
  • AWS has a record of occasional severe outages, which has a cascading effect on the large number of high-profile services that now run on its infrastructure. Despite the spectacular nature of these outages, it is unlikely that a self-managed data center would achieve significantly better uptime.
  • It is also the case that AWS outages can be mitigated with effective use of multiple deployment 'zones' and regions. This is something that any mission-critical application should be doing anyway as part of disaster recovery preparations.
  • It would be difficult to quantify the ROI exactly, but it virtually eliminates capital expenditures on hardware and at least halves the need for IT labor.
I would gladly rely on AWS for any large-scale application deployment. For prototyping and small-scale applications, a more heavily managed environment on top of the 'bare metal' virtual infrastructure, such as Heroku or Elastic Bean Stalk, is probably a more productive approach in most cases.
AWS is like the IBM of cloud infrastructure. It's hard to really go wrong with it. If you do, it's probably your own fault.

Product Usage

50 - Product development, IT
  • It is used to host a set of custom services (built and deployed as Java web applications) to supplement a primary application that runs within the Salesforce platform.

Evaluation and Selection

I switched from purchasing machines, hauling them to the data center and installing them myself.
We also looked at Rackspace but was attracted to AWS by the breadth of services available at comparable cost and reliability.

Implementation

Training

  • Self-taught
It was relatively easy for a developer to learn how to use it for simple scenarios. Setting up more complex virtual infrastructure with multiple tiers, redundancy and failover is more of a challenge to to take on from scratch, but a number of companies offer support in the form of deployment templates and additional services.

Configuration

Once you get to the point of configuring your machines, there is not much difference between physical and virtual. You still need to maintain the operating system, configure networking, etc.

Support

Neutral, no experience with either.
No - Documentation combined with large amount of additional detail on the web is sufficient.

Usability

The management console is the weak part of the service in my experience. It is adequate but slow.

Reliability

Availability is very good, with the exception of occasional spectacular outages.
AWS does not provide the raw performance that you can get by building your own custom infrastructure. However, it is often the case that the benefits of specialized, high-performance hardware do not necessarily outweigh the significant extra cost and risk. Performance as perceived by the user is very different from raw throughput.

Integration

  • Salesforce
Integration is via a custom SOAP API. It was not difficult.
  • No.

Vendor Relationship

It was entirely self-service. We signed up online and pay the bill with a credit card.
We did not negotiate.