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Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Score8.8 out of 10

344 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)?

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Users can launch instances with a variety of OSs, load them with custom application environments, manage network access permissions, and run images on multiple systems.

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 344 ratings of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)'s features
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Top Performing Features

  • Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime

    The service uptime as a percentage defined in the SLA

    Category average: 8.6

  • Elastic load balancing

    Automatic balancing and distribution of resources across multiple virtual computers

    Category average: 8.5

  • Security controls

    Compliance with security protocols like SSL and AES

    Category average: 8.1

Areas for Improvement

  • Pre-defined machine images

    Range of different server configurations available

    Category average: 7.8

  • Pre-configured templates

    Pre-defined templates for virtual machines

    Category average: 7.6

  • Monitoring tools

    Monitoring tools provide alerts when problems are detected

    Category average: 7.9

Reviews

What users are saying about Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
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Continuous Evolving Cloud

Incentivized
Verified User
Manager in Information Technology (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) are being used for our production, sandbox, and development ERP environment, PRTG network monitoring and Veeam and Commvault backup solutions. It addresses the application performance issue comparing to other Cloud service provider which despite being configured with higher CPU and RAM resources still underperform Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Additionally, AWS regularly releases new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) with higher performance but at a lower cost.

Pros

  • Instance type
  • Storage options
  • Purchase model
  • Security

Cons

  • Allow Spot instances to auto switch to on-demand when the capacity is need, instead of sudden interruption

Return on Investment

  • Shorter ROI compare to other similar service provider

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Azure Cloud Services

Other Software Used

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) helps to achieve faster time-to-market with a scalable cost-effective infrastructure

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is the core piece of our backend. We run almost all of our applications there. Our business requirements meet what the AWS cloud offers to us in terms of scalable capacity, specially Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) because we can setup the software we need, set up the services we want to run, the firewalls and the security patches and in few minutes have a running service for our backend. Also, it connects perfectly with other AWS services.

Pros

  • setup services
  • preconfigured services in marketplace
  • firewalls and security patches

Cons

  • the amount of information spread out in the internet seems confusing
  • there must be more real use case examples with real architectures

Return on Investment

  • business agility
  • faster time-to-market (in few days the app is in PROD)
  • on demand resources

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Amazon CloudFront, Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)

Other Software Used

Google Compute Engine, Heroku Platform

Honest Review - AWS EC2

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our organization uses Amazon EC2 to operate highly scalable machines for various machine learning services. We use a fleet of EC2 cluster groups combined with an auto scaling group and reserved / spot instances configuration for high performance.
The service addresses the problems of manual maintenance by automatically scaling machines based on demand and traffic.

Pros

  • Huge Diverse range of machine shapes are available which cater to our demand.
  • Ability to combine the machines and integrate them with any other service in AWS (Ex: RDS, S3)
  • Handling performance and scalability using auto-scaling, ELB configuration and high performance machine shapes.

Cons

  • More options and affordability for GPU machines.
  • Spot / Reserved Instances plans can be better
  • More flexibility in AWS CLI to handle ec2 machines.

Return on Investment

  • Positive impact: Using EC2 has reduced manual automation by 62%
  • Positive Impact: Using EC2 Spot Instances reduced costs by 39%
  • Negative Impact: Using EC2 microservices increased latency by 18%

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Azure VM Image Builder

Other Software Used

Azure VM Image Builder, VMware Fusion

userec2.aws.

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use our EC2 instances to host our backend app. It runs our web server that allows users to interact with our app via a browser. The product helps us deliver/process our user's designs and emails, send out automated emails and notifications, and run periodic security checks to ensure data integrity.

Pros

  • Easy to interact with instances via ssh.
  • Many different options and configurations to choose from.
  • Widespread compatibility with other cloud services especially AWS.

Cons

  • Interaction via amazon's console.
  • Complex setup/configurations to get it running.
  • Operating system versioning is done manually.

Return on Investment

  • We can easily handle crunch periods where usage is at its peak due to its scaling functionality.
  • We can ensure that the customer will have the fastest connection due to its availability worldwide and CDN support.
  • It has been expensive to have custom configurations and not using predefined images.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

DigitalOcean Droplets

Other Software Used

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), IBM Cloud Functions, Google Cloud Run

Easy and flexible deployment solutions.

Incentivized
Verified User
Director in Information Technology (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

EC2 allows us to scale our server usage as needed and automatically. There are a ton of price points and options for every need. We host several client sites on EC2 and can depend on it to be reliable and work. Upgrades and downgrades to server sizes are also straightforward.

Pros

  • Changing instance sizes.
  • Fast creation of new instances.
  • Automated backups.

Cons

  • Shutting down memory locked servers can be slow.
  • Upgrades between different architectures is very tedious.

Return on Investment

  • Less downtime resulting in less babysitting the servers at odd hours.
  • Consolidated multiple hosting providers into one.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

WP Engine, DreamHost and DigitalOcean

Other Software Used

PhpStorm, Sequel Pro, Sublime Text, ClickUp, Zendesk Suite, JumpCloud