Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Web Services
We use Amazon Web Services (AWS) throughout the organization as the delivery mechanism for our Software-as-a-Service product. It hosts our web server, databases, web services, transcoding, and storage for the entire delivery and allows us to leverage the global edge servers for content delivery to our users around the world. It is the platform for our entire product.
- Consistently available, one small hiccup in 3 years.
- Globally available. Our customers in Africa and the Australian Outback have extremely limited bandwidth and high latency. The global edge servers help with that.
- Instantly scalable. We go from a small handful of users to thousands in an instant, serving live streaming video across the globe sourced in different countries.
- Transcoding expenses (separate but related AWS product) are a tad expensive.
- Love the "free gift" of price decreases from time to time.
- Globally distributed development and management is a breeze.
We like the platform agnostic approach. At the time we selected it (some years back), the security standard was higher and the price point was lower, and the global reach was at least as strong. It was very easy to get started. For our business, we also looked at Akamai and Vimeo, since we are video based, but they did not offer anywhere near the PaaS suite that AWS did.