Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) vs. Navisite Managed Infrastructure Services (NaviCloud)

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

Clarify before hand any additional charges for remote hand and arrangement/SLA for remote hand. Negotiate well on these terms as they tend to be more flexible around this. Clarify shipping and handling charges if any.

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

• Remote hand services often pretty responsive and good follow through
• Shipping and handling was never an issue at Navisite facility for our hardware orders
• Managed services were also very competent to address issues within short amount of time

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

• Not very pro-active outside of monitoring
• Previous account rep was not customer focused
• The ticketing system they use, Proximity can be flaky. Sometimes, do not receive ticket updates

Incentivized

Price and facility equipment, location of the hosting facility factor into the decision to renew

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

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

Navisite's rates were better and they seemed to have more SQL Server expertise. This was about 5 years ago and it may not be the case anymore

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

• Cost savings by not having a full-time DBA on staff - saving of at least 50K a year
• Data team not on call 24/7
• Navisite team will try to fix issue if possible - e.g. shrink log files that have grown

Incentivized