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Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services

Overview

What is Amazon Web Services?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing services. With over 165 services offered, AWS services can provide users with a comprehensive suite of infrastructure and computing building blocks and tools.

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Learn from top reviewers

AWS - still good

Rating: 10 out of 10
June 24, 2025
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
We use AWS as a primary cloud provider across a range of services. That includes managed compute fleet, networking, covers some of the load balancing and multi region disaster...
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Michael Bravo
Engineer - Engineering
Cloud Infrastructure Engineer
Wix
Amazon Web Services19 years of experience

Looking for Cloud services go with the market leader AWS.

Rating: 8 out of 10
June 23, 2025
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
We utilize AWS to fulfill our various organizational needs, which range from using AWS compute, SaaS, PaaS, DBaaS, and IAM. We have multiple applications and databases deploye...
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Verified user
Consultant
Amazon Web Services6 years of experience

Amazon Web Services Usage

Rating: 9 out of 10
June 19, 2025
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
Amazon Web Services are basically used to host infrastructure in cloud. In our organization cloud is future solution , therefore all the applications has been asked to moved t...
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Karan Jaitak
Consultant - Engineering
Infrastructure Engineer
Credit Suisse
Amazon Web Services10 years of experience

Amazon Web Services

Rating: 8 out of 10
June 19, 2025
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
Amazon Web Services offers a diverse range of services. It's an adaptable platform for a number of applications and business needs. Amazon Web Services is super scalable and f...
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Michael Nemeyer
Project Manager - Finance and Accounting
Senior Associate
Rock Creek
Amazon Web Services5 years of experience

Amazon Web Services My Preferred Cloud Platform

Rating: 10 out of 10
June 17, 2025
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
We are using various services of Amazon Web Services for storage, compute, container orchestration and a lot more. We are using S3 for storage of various documents and files. ...
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Arvind Kumar
Team Lead - Engineering
Senior Software Engineering Lead
Optum
Amazon Web Services7 years of experience
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Pricing

View all pricing

Free Tier

$0

Cloud
per month

Basic Environment

$100 - $200

Cloud
per month

Intermediate Environment

$250 - $600

Cloud
per month

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.clickittech.com/aws/aws…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Starting price (does not include set up fee)

  • $100 per month
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Features

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

IaaS provides the basic building blocks for an IT infrastructure like servers, storage, and networking, in an on-demand model over the Internet

8.4
Avg 8.2
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Product Details

What is Amazon Web Services?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing services. With over 165 services offered, AWS services can provide users with a comprehensive suite of infrastructure and computing building blocks and tools. According to Amazon, AWS is suitable for organizations of any size, and helps to efficiently power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. AWS is also known for its service coverage, with over 69 Availability Zones across the world, allowing for users to experience lower latency and prevent their data centers from failing, which is important for cloud computing services.

AWS product range covers, but is not necessarily limited to, the following categories:

  • Analytics

  • Application Integration

  • AR & VR

  • AWS Cost Management

  • Blockchain

  • Business Applications

  • Compute

  • Customer Engagement

  • Database

  • Developer Tools

  • End User Computing

  • Game Tech

  • Internet of Things

  • Machine Learning

  • Management & Governance

  • Media Services

  • Migration & Transfer

  • Mobile

  • Networking & Content Delivery

  • Robotics

  • Satellite

  • Security, Identity, & Compliance

  • Storage

Pricing varies greatly across their vast scope of products, but AWS does provide an “AWS Free Tier” offering of services. Depending on the product, users can use the product for free indefinitely, a year, or in shorter-term trials.


Amazon Web Services Integrations

Amazon Web Services Competitors

Amazon Web Services Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing services. With over 165 services offered, AWS services can provide users with a comprehensive suite of infrastructure and computing building blocks and tools.

Amazon Web Services starts at $100.

DXC Managed Cloud Services, 9STAR EasyIdentity Cloud, and 9STAR Elastic SSO are common alternatives for Amazon Web Services.

Reviewers rate Elastic load balancing highest, with a score of 9.3.

The most common users of Amazon Web Services are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews From Top Reviewers

View all reviews
(1-3 of 3)

AWS in Action

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized
June 11, 2025
Verified User
Manager in Information Technology
Health, Wellness and Fitness Company, 10,001+ employees
Vetted Review
Verified User
Amazon Web Services
10 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use it to run multiple applications and storing data on AWS's global network of data centers. We also use AWS for cloud services and infrastrcture. We also use it for mulitple SAAS applications, and Data Storage that holds multiple containers. These are the primary uses for AWS that we use.
Pros
  • Host our Web Applications
  • Infrastructure Services
  • Network Data Centers
Cons
  • Hybrid models of data storage
  • Data Analytics
  • Network Management
Likelihood to Recommend
AWS has a very wide range of different analytic services that are great for our business needs and requirements. The AWS infrastructure allows us to process and analyze extremely large data sets and we also use it for web hosting, email services, and content delivery networks.
Amazon Web Services Feature Ratings
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) (9)
86.66666666666666%
8.7
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime
70%
7.0
Dynamic scaling
90%
9.0
Elastic load balancing
90%
9.0
Pre-configured templates
70%
7.0
Monitoring tools
100%
10.0
Pre-defined machine images
100%
10.0
Operating system support
100%
10.0
Security controls
80%
8.0
Automation
80%
8.0
Return on Investment
  • Improved productivity
  • Easy Reporting structures
  • Increased efficiencies
Usability
8
The overall usability is simple but also provides a very good outlook on reporting. We use the tool for varoius applications and mutliple purposes and it is broad enough to cover all of our bases. We have various team members with different levels of knowledge that have all been successful.
Alternatives Considered
we feel that Azure is a little more clunky and not as user friendly as the AWS model.
Other Software Used
Users and Roles
8
8 resources oversee the pillar of work for our AWS services. They oversee the data center and cloud costs, the agility of the tool to ensure clients are able to access products and features of our services. Also across teh entire organization we have direction from Sr. Staff to use AWS for reporting features.
Support Headcount Required
8
They are dedicated 100% to the AWS Data Centers. The ensure the security aspect of the data that is going into the cloud.

AWS can be a Differentiator

Rating: 9 out of 10
December 20, 2013
MS
Marc Schriftman
Director of Software Development
Moxie Software, Inc. (Computer Software, 201-500 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
Amazon Web Services
3 years of experience
Pros
  • AWS constantly innovates and iterates, announcing new features several times per year. Earlier this year, for example, they introduced provisioned IOPS for EBS, suddenly providing us with an inexpensive solution to a performance quandary we'd been facing.
  • AWS has provided us with access to the product owners and architects of the products we use most. In turn, those resources provided us with visibility into the product road maps. This enabled us to improve our long-term infrastructure planning, and avoid expensive features that we'd get for free later in the year.
  • AWS peremptorily lowers costs a couple of times per year. This has helped us keep our bill reasonable even as we consume more and more of the AWS services. We periodically compare the cost of AWS to the cost of moving into our colo, and every year the colo looks less and less attractive.
Cons
  • Occasionally, we disagree with their roadmap priorities. For example, we really needed Content-Based Routing added to ELB to support our multitenant implementation. The AWS architects agreed that it was a mainstream, valuable request and hinted that they were trying to get it onto the roadmap, but 15 months later there's still no sign of it. I'm sure they have their reasons, but it's a strange and annoying hole in an otherwise invaluable service.
  • AWS has had well-publicized outages that have broken the promise of true zone (datacenter) isolation. This was supposed to have been impossible - if you had instances running in two zones within a region, you thought had a solid survivability story. We were forced to react by building out additional redundancy that increased costs beyond our original design estimates. AWS claims to have resolved the problem, but we haven't been confident enough to spin down the extra servers yet.
  • There are annoying resource limits, presumably in place to prevent hackers from allocating huge numbers of resources on a compromised account. The problem is that raising the resource limits requires manual action to be taken, and can have a severe impact on production software if your ops team isn't meticulous in checking the limits. As of the last time I checked, these limits weren't available via API, making it impossible to create alarms whenever we get close to exceeding our resource limits.
  • AWS is relatively infamous for their poor communications during outages. Their status page will occasionally go without an update for 45 minutes, while half your customers are dead in the water. This is - obviously - infuriating.
Return on Investment
  • AWS's autoscaling capabilities allow us to automate the provisioning and deprovisioning of hardware in response to demand, allowing us in turn to lower our hosting bills and increase our margins.
  • AWS's APIs are comprehensive and well-designed. They have greatly assisted our devops team in the building of tools that have enabled a wide range of operational improvements, including zero-downtime upgrades which benefit our customers directly.
  • AWS's friendly administrative panels make it easy for developers to spin up and connect the resources they need to test prototypes and develop innovative solutions quickly. This has increased the velocity of our development team, and helped us turn around architecturally complex features very quickly.
Likelihood to Renew
10
We are almost entirely satisfied with the service. In order to move off it, we'd have to build for ourselves many of the services that AWS provides and the cost would be prohibitive. Although there are cost savings and security benefits to returning to the colo facility, we could never afford to do it, and we'd hate to give up the innovation and constant cycle of new features that AWS gives us.
Likelihood to Recommend
  • The AWS forums are well monitored and very helpful - go there first if you get stuck and you'll get long, detailed answers from AWS representatives who will follow the conversation and come back for follow-up questions.
  • AWS is tight-lipped about roadmaps until your bill reaches a certain size (for us, 2 years ago, it was at about $50K/mo that we started getting access to the people who really knew what was going on.)
Users and Roles
25
  • Development uses AWS to develop, test and prototype infrastructure stories. With access to the same images that exist in the production environment, developers have confidence that features built in the development environment will work the same way in other (i.e. production) environments
  • QA uses AWS to spin up instances of feature branches, test them, and spin them back down
  • Devops manages the various AWS environments, and uses the AWS APIs to build deployment and monitoring tools
Support Headcount Required
2
We have 2 senior devops engineers that maintain 4 AWS 'environments' (dev, qa, perf, prod). The administrative consoles are good enough for basic maintenance, but most advanced work requires that they be capable of scripting interactions via the APIs or CLI. CloudFormation is good at building stacks, but is insufficient for real configuration management, so chef or puppet skills will also be important.
Business Processes Supported
  • Development - easy access to hardware and networking resources enables innovation.
  • QA - easy access to environments that mirror production enable on-demand testing at the feature and/or system level.
  • Production - sophisticated Disaster Recovery, Business Continuity, Performance and Scalability features help us meet SLAs and keep our customers happy.
  • Professional Services - easy access to environments that mirror customer environments enable ad hoc customization testing.
Innovative Uses
  • Autosizing - runtime customization of resources like IOPS and storage, combined with the ability to easily upsize and downsize a server has enabled us to build servers customized for its purpose, removing the need in many case to decide between function and cost.
  • AWS added the Simple Email Service (SES) shortly after we first migrated, allowing us to get rid of our mail server and all of the maintenance and support overhead that it caused.
Future Planned Uses
  • AWS Elasticache - we are currently caching in MongoDB because it was just as fast as our old memcached server. We will probably move to elasticache soon, lightening the load on the database and - possibly - increasing performance.
  • CloudFront - we have not needed it yet, but the easy integration to CloudFront will be very attractive when it comes time to commit our assets to CDN.
Products Replaced
No
Alternatives Considered
Rackspace loses to AWS on both features and price, and their reputation for top-notch customer service just doesn't make up for it, especially if you have talented ops resources who find themselves rarely dependent upon support channels. Even when they do, AWS has a very active user community and very active forums where authoritative responders answer questions at all times of the day.
Key Differentiators
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
Price is always a factor and usability is obviously important. The broad feature set made it feasible for us to build complex architectures in the cloud. But it was Amazon's reputation that sealed the deal. It's reputation is solid and so well known that we sell it in sales calls to this day. When customers want to hear about ISO 27000 certifications that we just don't have, we talk about Amazon's certified datacenters instead and -- maybe surprisingly -- this generally works.
Evaluation Lessons Learned
Since I'm happy with how the process turned out, I wouldn't change much. If I were going to change anything, I'd look less at the ancillary services that we could build ourselves relatively easily, and concentrate on the core value propositions of a public cloud, which -- to my mind -- are the API and the provisioning capabilities. AWS would win anyway, but for different reasons.

Hard to go wrong with AWS!

Rating: 8 out of 10
January 31, 2013
Verified User
Anonymous
Computer Software Company, 1001-5000 employees
Vetted Review
Verified User
Amazon Web Services
3 years of experience
Pros
  • 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.
Cons
  • 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.
Return on Investment
  • 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.
Likelihood to Renew
8
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
Users and Roles
50
Product development, IT
Support Headcount Required
4
Business Processes Supported
  • 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.
Products Replaced
I switched from purchasing machines, hauling them to the data center and installing them myself.
Alternatives Considered
We also looked at Rackspace but was attracted to AWS by the breadth of services available at comparable cost and reliability.
Implementation Details / Implementation Partner
  • Implemented in-house
Implementation Rating
10
Training Types Used
  • Self-taught
Ease of Amazon Web Services Training
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.
Additional Customization Considerations
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.
Premium Support
No
Documentation combined with large amount of additional detail on the web is sufficient.
Support Rating
5
Neutral, no experience with either.
Usability
9
The management console is the weak part of the service in my experience. It is adequate but slow.
Reliability and Availability
9
Availability is very good, with the exception of occasional spectacular outages.
Performance
0
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.
Systems Integrated With
  • Salesforce
Integration is via a custom SOAP API. It was not difficult.
Future Integration Plans
  • No.
Pre-Sale Experience
0
It was entirely self-service. We signed up online and pay the bill with a credit card.
Key Negotiation Points
We did not negotiate.
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