Amazon EC2

What differentiates Amazon EC2 from other similar products?

The scale and diversity of features that Amazon EC2 offers are unparalleled as compared to its competitors. It offers memory starting from 1 GB to 24 TB, which can be scaled on demand. This range, along with an outstanding quality and brand name, is not offered by any other competitor within my purview.

What is your favorite aspect of this product?

The best thing about Amazon EC2 is that it flexibly scales the resources in the backend as per the requirements. While looking for a solution that could help us scale our analytics with minimal increase in processing time, we found out about Amazon EC2 and how we could leverage it to deploy the applications differently to different clients, depending on their compute requirements. Our clients now do not need to limit the usage of other tools on their Local system fearing the lack of memory available and freezing of their applications due to insufficient CPU and RAM available from using our applications!

What do you dislike most about this product?

The actual pricing structure of Amazon EC2 is much more complex than what is mentioned in their pricing guide. When we couple this with automated reports not being sent by Amazon Web Services when the EC2 is severely underutilized for long durations, the team ends up having a significant cost disadvantage. It would be helpful if the actual pricing is simplified so that the costs could be estimated accurately. If the team sends automated mail reports of the EC2 usage, we could negotiate with our clients for lesser compute in case of significant underutilization, eventually helping us reduce our costs.

What recommendations would you give to someone considering this product?

I would recommend every firm heavily reliant on IT infrastructure for internal/client work purchase this product. I work as a part of the Product team at ZS, which works on developing cutting-edge applications for diagnostic analysis using Machine Learning. To address the limitations of fixed compute of Local System coupled with the high execution times, we chose to leverage Amazon EC2 to provide the computing services to our clients based on their requirements. Our clients are now satisfied and can work seamlessly on our applications, even processing 5 GB datasets on Amazon EC2's 64 GB compute servers.

What differentiates Amazon EC2 from other similar products?

- EC2 offers windows support while some cloud computing companies do not offer full support to windows OS. - Different types of pricing strategy going from spot instance to reserve instance gives lots of flexibility as per user's demand. - AWS is one of the oldest instance provider vendor due to which it is available in many regions and due to more customers the prices are also comparably low.

What is your favorite aspect of this product?

- Very inexpensive as compared to traditional servers. - There are too many different types of servers that we can use depending upon our use. Lots of customisation is possible. - Lot of different pricing strategy available depending upon use case , which can help the user in saving lots of dollars. - Easy availability so whenever the traffic increases scaling can be done quickly without any down time. - Lot of type of storage options also available which can be paired with single server or multiple server.

What do you dislike most about this product?

- Elastic load balancing is possible inside multiple availability zone but inside one region. So in a event where a region goes down there are chance that all the servers go down at once. - In the event where instance is stopped and restarted than if elastic IP is not attached the IP address changes so we need to go to the AWS console to get the IP address to access the server via SSH.

What recommendations would you give to someone considering this product?

- Use AMI to customize the image(OS) for your server instance. So while scaling when new instances come up using the AMI customization happens automatically and we do not need to run commands to do those customization

What differentiates Amazon EC2 from other similar products?

Cost effective , highly scalable, easy backup and high availability.

What is your favorite aspect of this product?

High scalability and cost as per use.

What do you dislike most about this product?

Limit of resources as per reagion

What recommendations would you give to someone considering this product?

Ease of usage and cost effective.