Global reach and scale at bargain prices
March 01, 2016

Global reach and scale at bargain prices

Glen West | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

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.
If you don't already have your own infrastructure, why would you ever build it these days? Pay for what you use. The jump to dedicated servers is necessary when you provide a global 24x7 SaaS product, but the price differential when usage is very low is significant. If you need global access to your product/service/data, it comes as standard functionality with AWS.

Amazon Web Services Feature Ratings

Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime
10
Dynamic scaling
10
Elastic load balancing
Not Rated
Pre-configured templates
Not Rated
Monitoring tools
4
Pre-defined machine images
Not Rated
Operating system support
9
Security controls
9