Who Buys & Uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
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Insights from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Reviewers
Based on 5 verified reviews published in the last 18 months
TrustRadius Community Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when relevant, HG Insights data.
Overview
Synthesised from 5 reviews | Last Published April 23, 2026
This product assessment is based on a synthesis of 5 recent reviews analyzing Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) across four dimensions: overall satisfaction, strengths, weaknesses, and business impact. EC2 is used by organizations to host web platforms, backend applications, and development/production environments. A key benefit of EC2, cited by 4 out of 5 reviewers, is its scalability and performance, enabling it to handle varying workloads effectively. Reviewers also praised the flexibility in instance types and auto-scaling capabilities for managing infrastructure and peak demands. However, 3 out of 5 reviewers expressed concerns regarding instance management, particularly with Spot Instances, and suggested improvements to Reserved Instance plans. While 3 of 5 reviewers noted cost savings as a positive impact, 2 reviewers mentioned increased latency and potential cost issues with custom configurations. Overall, EC2 offers a flexible and scalable infrastructure solution, but users should carefully consider instance management complexities and potential cost implications.
Pros
Scalability and performance to handle varying workloads
Flexibility in instance types to fit different needs
Integration capabilities with other AWS services
Auto-scaling capabilities for managing infrastructure and peak demands
Potential for cost savings compared to traditional infrastructure
Cons
Complex instance management, particularly with Spot Instances
Need for more flexible handling of Spot Instances, such as automatic switching to on-demand instances
Setup and configuration process can be complex and require simplification
Potential for increased latency in certain use cases
We use EC2 to rapidly and efficiently scale up or down as needed for our customers while still providing a secure and dependable environment. It enables us to swiftly supply new instances and adjust resource allocation as necessary.We also use EC2 to provide high-performance computing, process data, and do analytics.
Pros
its pay-as-you-go pricing approach
effectively provide and manage compute resources
adjust resource allocation
Cons
nothing as such but some more cross functional policies can be added
Likelihood to Recommend
Good Scenario : EC2 is a wonderful option when you need to execute a lot of compute-intensive tasks, like producing videos or performing scientific calculations. It is the best option for applications that call for a lot of processing power due to its fast CPUs and potent GPUs.Bad Scenario : The best option for conducting lengthy tasks might not be EC2. Since EC2 instances are made to be quickly spun up and down, they might not be the greatest option for jobs that call for prolonged compute cycles.
EC2 is being used primarily by one major division (department) of our organization but indirectly by the entire organization. The main division that uses it is tasked with continuously developing new tools and technologies for organization-wide use and EC2 allows us to quickly and efficiently obtain and configure the necessary servers for each new project and subproject as they arise, or as the ideas come to us without having to go through the lengthy traditional channels of submitting proposals, and requesting budgeting etc each time we need more server space.
Pros
It's cost-effective because you pay for only what you use, this is imperative in not-for-profit higher ed, and there are also no long term commitments or upfront fees. This is only one of the pricing options available (the one that best serves us) so there is flexibility.
Which is my next point, the flexibility of EC2 is what sets is apart from anything else. It is designed to not let the technology get in the way of your ideas and work.
It is VERY quick and easy to get up and running. Someone brand new to EC2 could have this up and running very fast.
Cons
Performance..EC2 is somewhat slow by comparison and is getting worse as faster processors and hard drives come in the to market.
Reserved instances.. while they eliminate the price-gap, they do nothing about the performance gap.
Platform Specific Language that is of any AWS product. The more you need to do with your system and the further you go "inside", the further you go from traditionally recognized languages and their operations. There is a learning curve and it's oftentimes necessary to have support.
Likelihood to Recommend
EC2 is a perfect solution for a team of skilled developers who are familiar with cloud computing, able to make basic translations, and cannot be hassled by the politics/paperwork shuffle of dealing with the ebb and flow of server changes. EC2 would not be a good solution for a very small team with perhaps a single server need or perhaps a larger team with multiple server needs but without technical personnel.
VU
Verified User
Project Manager in Research & Development (201-500 employees)
I have used AWS to provide web infrastructure including load balancing, databases, web servers, and content distribution. It's great for this because it offers so many tools without having to pay the up-front cost of deploying them. You pay for what you use. That does not mean it's cheap, but at least it's accessible. The speed of deployment is also a benefit.
Pros
Very helpful tech support
Fast deployment of all offered services
Wide array of services offered
Cons
The virtual desktop service is not the industry standard replacement for hardware desktops that you'd expect.
Once you define VPC subnets, you can't go back and modify them.
No read replica support for MS SQL RDS instances.
Likelihood to Recommend
AWS is well suited for most uses. Even if you have a preference for specific vendor hardware, there are often virtual appliances offered within AWS. BigIP F5 load balancers for example. If you need to be up and running relatively quickly, including the ability to quickly make changes to your environment, AWS is great. It's also great in that you can grow into it and its many many services. However, it is not cheap by any means.
We use several dozen EC2 instances for immutable/disposable infrastructure that Docker containers can run on top of. We currently use it in several departments in addition to a private data center, but greatly favor EC2 and are in the process of moving data center servers over to EC2.The price we pay for EC2 is made up because we need less staff managing the infrastructure that we run.
Pros
Stability is a big key of EC2 - it does what it says it does every time.
Flexibility is great for EC2. You can spin up instances from a standard image (e.g. Ubuntu), your own AMI built from CI (unique AMIs for each deployment), or one of the 80k+ of community AMIs.
Ability to run instances in your own Virtual Private Cloud - a MUST for many larger organizations.
Tremendous security options.
Cons
Compared to several newer cloud providers (e.g. DigitalOcean), EC2 instances create and destroy very slowly. This is generally not an issue, but can be for some.
AWS is incredibly featureful, and therefore, not the most simple of services to learn.
AWS is slowly upgrading their UI, which is helpful. It's a little behind other UIs, but not too bad.
Likelihood to Recommend
The larger the company, the better AWS seems to fit. The 2 primary reasons for this are price and security features. For more budget-focused startups, there are significantly cheaper solutions out there with far fewer security features. Mid-sized to enterprise level companies, however, will require the AWS security features if they are to authorize the use of cloud computing instances over in-house data centers.
We are using Amazon Elastic Cloud (EC2) for our web applications and analytics work. Right now we have implemented it in few departments only but we are planning to implement it across the organization. EC2 is very helpful in providing infrastructure support for a growing business. Earlier we were relying on our in-house infrastructure team, but it's tough to grow infrastructure with your business growth. For a scalable infrastructure we decided to move to the cloud, and after considering many factors we find that AWS EC2 is best for our requirements.
Pros
One year free tier subscription, which makes it very cost effective for training the new resources.
Large communities with thousands of machines having preinstalled software as per need.
AWS EC2 has a very competitive pricing scheme with on-demand, spot instances plan and reserved instances.
Sharing AMI is the one of best features. You can share your machine image with another user.
Cons
Although AWS EC2 is best in the market, in addition, they could provide more robust monitoring tools for EC2 resources.
They don't have the facility to block IPs for inbound traffic. Although this can be achieved by carefully allowing the inbound traffic. But adding the flexibility to block IPs or exclude some IPs from inbound would be great.
They need to provide one dashboard where they could show the list of all the resources from a region. Right now a user needs to select a particular region to check the resources being used.
Likelihood to Recommend
AWS Elastic Compute Cloud is one of the best cloud computing technologies among all their competitors whether its Azure or Google. AWS EC2 is available with very competitive pricing and based on the wide market it’s very easy to get AWS technical experts. And as it has much more functionality along with EC2 like S3 RDS route53, this makes it a one stop for all infrastructure needs.
VU
Verified User
Consultant in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)
