Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Information Reviews & Insights

Score8.9 out of 10

344 Reviews and Ratings

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
Cost can escalate with custom configurations

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Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Reviews

13 Reviews

InformationComputer Software6Computer Networking1Internet4Telecommunications1Publishing1

EC2 - often better to buy direct

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

August 31, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Generally, I've seen EC2 used by the entire company as I've worked mostly in environments where there were only other Software Engineers making up the bulk of the company.

It frequently addressed the issue of having reliable web servers or virtual machines without having to actually acquire physical servers, rely on resellers of the service or deal with other providers who I've had technical issues with in the past.

Pros

Variety of sizes, you can fine-tune your instance quite a lot rather than being tied into specific tiers like some resellers offer.
Easy to provision, either using an Amazon tool or AMI, Terraform and/or Ansible I've found it easy to get set up and going on a new EC2 instance.

Cons

With the rise of tools such as Ansible it would be good to see AWS provide similar standardised tooling for EC2.

Likelihood to Recommend

I've found that while EC2 and AWS might mean initially more setup than purchasing compute resources through a reseller it makes life much easier down the line as you have more control over your instances and other resources. This also ends up that it will cost more dev time up front but less money in comparison.

It's also possible to fine-tune your AWS spending whereas I've found this difficult with AWS resellers in the past.

Ryan MacGillivray

Software Engineer in Information Technology at Zen Educate (Computer Software, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

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Highly recommend cloud computing instances like EC2

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

August 31, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it for dev instances, staging instances and production instances for the whole organization. We automatically spin up instances as needed, automatically configure the settings and software we need, and it's ready to go in seconds. Prior to this we used managed hosting which caused too many problems with bad customer support and limited access to the servers preventing us from solving our own problems with bugs and scaling.

Pros

Full control over the software and settings.
Instant availability of a new server with the power you require.
Thorough permission support to ensure only those who have the rights to monitor or configure the servers can do so.
Many world wide locations to make sure it's closer to the country your users are in.

Cons

Huge learning curve. To get a basic instance up with default settings is very easy, but there's hundreds or perhaps thousands of settings without explanations of what they do.
Multiple ways to do the same thing, like the browser console, the command line, and APIs, means finding answers on how to do something may be provided only in one way and not the way you have to do it.
Lack of documentation on best practices in many scenarios. AWS assumes you have devops experience and makes it too easy for you to make mistakes and follow bad practices.

Likelihood to Recommend

It's great when you need a web site or service up and running immediately with specific settings and software. It's great when you need to scale it within minutes and only pay for the time that the extra power is used. It's not so great when you want to learn how everything works and the documentation is difficult to find or worded differently or out dated because things seem to change every year or two on AWS but the documentation lags a little behind.

James Hilton

Senior Web Developer and Manager of Issues in Engineering at LabRoots (Publishing, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

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Using AWS EC2 to offer a full technology platform with a small agency

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

August 31, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use EC2 instances to deploy development, staging, and test environments. We also use EC2 to manage Magento ecommerce sites for clients. We also deploy our SaaS customer portal solution on AWS EC2 instances. It is mainly used by our development team. It provides us scalable development capabilities and the ability to easily deploy dev copies of any client site.

Pros

Easily launch new instances of a 'saved site' using AIM.
We easily start/stop instances used for testing so that we don't have to pay when not in use. We wrote API calls to allow this to be done from our help desk software.
Automated backups using Lambda.
Hosting/Managing sites for clients is much better on AWS because we can control almost everything from the console.

Cons

I would say mostly in documentation. Things can be really complicated to try to learn from their existing documentation.
Lambda should offer more simple tools for retainage rules for automated backups.
Amazon SES should have a built in dashboard for tracking emails instead of making you use the API to develop your own.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is least appropriate where you don't have the technical expertise to manage your own servers. And it's not very well suited for someone who isn't willing to monitor and manage the costs. It's perfect for development firms and smaller agencies that provide managed hosting because the infrastructure is reliable and safe and it's much easier to manage the costs when you can deploy and scale at will.

Lynn Thames

Owner in Information Technology at Excel Software Services, Inc. (Computer Software, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

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Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) - An amazing tool.

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

August 30, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in all areas of our organization. A lot of our legacy infrastructure is in EC2 that supports every person in the organization. It's a great way to build a computer resource, on the fly, and in many different instance sizes. The resource selection is amazing.

Pros

Instance choices
Availability
Quick Spinup

Cons

None.

Likelihood to Recommend

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is best suited for anyone needing a computer resource. It truly can be used for any computer resource needs you may have.

The surrounding infrastructure pieces, like load balancers, route53, etc, make EC2 amazing.

For when you don't need a full computer, using ECS or EKS can be an alternate, container-based solution.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (Computer Software company, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

Review for AWS EC2 instance

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

August 30, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Amazon EC2 is being used by the whole engineering department and also in production to deploy cloud applications. All the REST APIs are being developed and deployed on EC2 instances using the JAVA application. It solves one of the most important problems for our organization, in that it has multiple copies of application servers through EC2 and is highly available.

Pros

It solves the problem of high availability when using with a load-balancer
Very easy to manage through the console
Depending on the type of EC2, it really does its job very well w/r/t to computing optimized or memory optimized applications.

Cons

It will be really great for smaller organizations where some training can be provided w/r/t how and in what situations to use EC2 instances, which can be ideal.

Likelihood to Recommend

EC2 is really useful in distributed architectures applications. It solves many business problems and is easy to manage without us having to worry about any physical server. EC2 can be tricky provided the options it gives w/r/t sizing, and sometimes it doesn't work with smaller instances, but bigger instances are costly so organizations can't afford bigger instances

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (Telecommunications company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Fully featured cloud containers

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

August 29, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

EC2 is used by us for the majority of our servers. We use it to support cloud-based applications that run on servers. EC2 substitutes having to run servers locally in our datacenters. EC2 is just as basic virtual machine system that allows us to customize them in any way we want and add whatever software we need.

Pros

Easy to start and stop
Well priced
Completely customizable

Cons

Difficulty identifying exactly what type of instance you want/need
Networking can be confusing
Poor UI

Likelihood to Recommend

EC2 is an excellent service if you need to replace the power of a data center with many machines all interconnected with networking and a great automation system to set up your environment in a single button press. It is less ideal for smaller scale operations where you only need a server or two or expect to have very light load on your servers and don't need all the extra power provided by EC2.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (Computer Software company, 10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

EC2 - reliable and cost effective

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

August 29, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our product was redesigned from the ground up to use EC2. The way that our product has been architected helps up utilize the EC2 infrastructure effectively and has cut our hosting costs by 900%. It has also greatly lowers the difficulty of deploying new releases to all of our customers.

Pros

On demand instances for limited time and heavy processing greatly saves on cost.
Reserved instances allow for cost savings for instances that you plan on having running all of the time.
Many options of instance types allow you to customize the type of processing you need.

Cons

Programming and product changes may be required to use EC2 in the most efficient way.
EC2 is best used by rethinking your hosting model. You get the most benefit by throwing out the idea of just launching a virtual machine per customer.
Most users don't understand the pricing model and miss out on cost savings.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is a great infrastructure to work with if you are architecting a product. Lots of tools to use and options within AWS that integrate easily with EC2. If you are simply looking to launch virtual machines, make sure you are looking at Reserved Instances and not On Demand instances.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (Computer Software company, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

EC2: Power Hosting for DIYers

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

January 8, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are hosting a public-facing web application and some internal workers/APIs on a medium-sized pool of EC2 instances. We use Docker with a container orchestration system to manage these services. By running directly on EC2, we are able to utilize spot pricing which saves us 80-90% on our hosting costs.

Pros

AWS EC2 instances are extremely generic and allow you to build infrastructure that isn't tied to a particular provider because it's essentially just a server.
AWS EC2 allows you to create images from one server and launch other servers with the same image, making scaling and fault-tolerance much easier.
AWS EC2 integrates with other AWS services like Cloudwatch to make monitoring performance issues very simple.

Cons

You forsake a lot of the added features and tailored simplicity that comes with cloud services like Elastic Beanstalk.
Launching, configuring, and maintaining your EC2 instance comes with a fair bit of overhead.
AWS is not the cheapest option if you are just running generic Linux servers on EC2.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you need full configuration control over the servers that your applications run on, then EC2 is well-suited for your use-case. It essentially grants you ownership of your choice of server without the significant overhead that accompanies physical ownership. However, if you're just looking to host a standard application like MySQL or Elasticsearch, I would recommend checking whether or not AWS offers that application as a hosted service. Using hosted services will reduce the amount of time you need to spend configuring and maintaining your servers.

Brian Dentino

Founder in Engineering at finbox.io (Internet, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

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EC2 -- take your QA and scaling woes to the cloud!

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

October 17, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

EC2 is being used to host both development/testing and production instances of small-scale web applications (<3000 users). These applications vary in engine (Node, PHP, Python, etc.) and EC2 gives us a flexible, project-agnostic platform to deploy and test upon.

We use EC2 to pull down current master copies of our code for QA as well as reference tagged versions for our production clusters.

Pros

Cheap -- just about the cheapest you can get out of any options on the market
CLI administration makes setup and maintenance a breeze -- version controllable dev infrastructure without the overhead of made-for-purpose infra VCS services is great
Flexible authentication systems -- Amazon goes above and beyond to handle complex security arrangements well
Well organized web UI

Cons

Low level networking support is minimal but getting better
EBS outages hurt, and I haven't been thrilled with reliability in previous months (it's been better since, though)
Latency for storage and instance provisioning can be frustrating while the tech is in the gap between provisioning that takes minutes vs. instant provisioning (waiting 30 secs - 1 minute for storage to provision, for example)

Likelihood to Recommend

EC2 is awesome if your prime need is scalability -- the "elastic" component of Elastic Compute is really what makes this a win. The ability to scale right up with the click of a button means that provisioning new instances to handle surges in production traffic or creating lots of test beds for the QA team is where your money is well spent. If you don't anticipate peaky traffic or find yourself with very static machine needs, simply provisioning a few instances by hand in the other non-EC2 parts of AWS is probably better -- you might even just consider a couple VPSs.

Verified User

Team Lead in Engineering (Internet company, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Trusted reliable performance for SAAS Applications

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

October 9, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have been hosting our SAAS Ecommerce platform since 2008 on Amazon EC2, back when there were only a handful of core services, EC2 , S3 and EBS. We have grown from hosting 300 Ecommerce websites to 1500+ in multiple regions, running 300 to 500 EC2 instances during peak periods.

Amazon EC2 has enabled us to expand into different countries with zero upfront cost, saved us from having to complete at least 2 full hardware refreshes and reduces our costs by allowing us to scale down infrastructure during non peak periods. As of Oct 2nd 2017 EC2 is per second billing, which will save us even more.

Amazon AWS is a trusted brand and has a proven track record providing infrastructure as service with the stability and performance needed to run any workload.

Pros

EC2 makes it easy to move to the cloud. You can spin up Windows servers, any flavour of Linux, pre-baked amazon public or marketplace images with applications pre-installed.
EC2 is great to test your proof of concept. Spin up as many servers as you want for your tests, run your tests for a few minutes and only pay for the time they are running.
EC2 with Elastic Load Balancing and AutoScaling provides an environment where you no longer worry about individual servers or about spikes in traffic. Any failed serves are automatically replaced, and when a spike occurs servers scale up and down to handle the load, while keeping costs at a minimum.
EC2 parameter store allows us to store application secrets, keeping them secure and only available to EC2 instances with the roles to allow access.

Cons

The only area for improvement that I've been looking for is shorter billing increments than 1 hour. This has just recently come into effect with per second billing as of Oct 2nd 2017.

Likelihood to Recommend

EC2 is great for running traditional software workloads, if you are building a new application Lambda may be a better candidate.

Jason Andres

IT Manager in Information Technology at Vin65 (Computer Software, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

9 years of experience

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