Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) vs. Amazon Elastic Transcoder

Suitable for companies that are looking for performance at a competitive price, flexibility to switch instance type even with RI, flexibility to add-on IOPS, option to lower running cost with the regular introduction of new instance type that comes with higher performance but at a lower cost.

Incentivized

If your entire stack is in AWS. Amazon Elastic Transcoder is easier to integrate into your workflow. As input and output files can be in S3. You can get notifications when your job is complete. If you want real-time transcoding it is not possible with this service.

Incentivized

• A great variety of choices in Amazon Machine Image (AMI) types. Users can select a more basic type to run generic workloads, but also have the choice to pick an AMI pre-installed with specific services in the AWS Marketplace.
• The range of instance types can support the usage from a student's exploration (inexpensive general-purpose nano instances) to an enterprise's most intense workloads (memory or storage-optimized instances with terabytes of memory and ultra-fast network connection).
• The pricing options, from regular instances, reserved instances to spot instances allow users to get the job done and make smart choices about how much they want to pay and when they want to pay.

Incentivized

• converting and playing audio and video files on the go
• cloud capability
• speed and reliability

Incentivized

• This service is a bit difficult to consume. New users need a big learning curve to use this service effectively.
• UI for EC2 service is a little complex and at many places, it misses detailed explanation.
• Sometimes it takes too long to create images of EC2 instances. This keeps your EC2 up for that extra time. When instances are heavy, it penalizes a lot of money.

Incentivized

• Cannot transcode videos in real time
• The quality of transcoded videos is average. There are other services that provide better quality output.
• Slow AWS support

Incentivized

It's easy and straightforward for a technical person to use it via SSH, but when working in cross-functional teams, using Amazon's web console is difficult for this particular service. Most modern cloud providers provide a more seamless user interface to interact with their cloud machines, and the same should have been the case with EC2.

Incentivized

AWS's support is good overall. Not outstanding, but better than average. We have had very little reason to engage with AWS support but in our limited experience, the staff has been knowledgeable, timely and helpful. The only negative is actually initiating a service request can be a bit of a pain.

Incentivized

Support for Amazon Elastic Transcoder is the same as any other service within AWS. If you are familiar with AWS, it is easy to start using Elastic Transcoder

Incentivized

Azure VM Builder offers good service, but the options are quite limited (Too much inclined to Windows as it is prepared by Microsoft). EC2 image building capabilities are the best in the market, and offer Windows, Linux (CentOS, rh2, debian, ubuntu), along with other distros, which helps customers choose according to their needs.

Incentivized

Amazon Elastic Transcoder is in a league of its own when compared to other alternatives in the market. The most noticeable competitor would be either Microsoft or Adobe or Google. When I had a chance to compare Azure products and Amazon products, the difference is obvious and the experience provided by both the products are very different in terms of user experience and interaction with the application. The cost and availability also were taken into consideration when choosing between the two shortlisted choices. So we went with Amazon's product as it is widely used and has support and maintenance which is basically better than the competition.

Incentivized

• With EC2 you pay only when is Running, so you can save up to 75% on Dev environments which are running only on office hours
• You have several ways to pay for EC2, with EC2 Reserved Instances you pay with a discount of up to 72% if you make a commitment of using them from 1 or 3 years
• With EC2 spot you can use spare AWS EC2 capacity with a discount of up to 90%, your workload must be interrupt tolerant as your EC2 could be reclaim by AWS and the EC2 terminated

Incentivized

• Amazon Elastic Transcoder is faster and costs less than most competitors

Incentivized