Amazon EC2

Overall I think EC2 is a good product especially if cost is not as important. The ability to configure everything through the cloud plus the reliability of AWS is very hard to beat.

I think EC2 was the first service we signed up for when we moved to AWS years ago. It was an eye-opening experience: we used to own hardware, and now we can just click buttons and make hardware appear? Insane. And yet, it worked. And still does. We have around 100 instances of varying sorts running at all times, most of them running either individual applications or (more recently) hosting a whole bunch of Docker containers via ECS. (This is the more powerful and better way to do things these days.)

The other huge boon for us was when AWS announced their Application Load Balancer. What this allows you to do is inspect every request and route it to specific targets if the request meets certain criteria. Got a staging server at staging.example.com? Just add that route to your ALB, and send it to your staging machine. Done. It's so simple, but so powerful.

Like much of AWS, the UI on EC2 has not quite kept up with the times. The almighty ALB, for instance, is hidden under a single small item in the left-nav, called "Load Balancers." Which is accurate, but doesn't exactly give them their due. Lots of other issues like that -- not always easy to find what you want to find, especially if you don't know exactly what you are looking for. But overall it's better than many other parts of AWS, so not complaining too much.

If you're on AWS at all, you're likely using EC2 already. Definitely don't forget to integrate CloudWatch so you can easily get logging!

What AWS don't tell you is that on top of your EC2 cost comes a whole range of other hidden costs. Costs that only creep up after you've been using the product for a long time. Almost as if it has been designed this way.

Specifically, I ran into trouble with CPU and Disk IO credits. This is not a thing on any other platform. EC2 allows you to "burst" your processing power or disk read/write speed. This is done automatically with no control from the administrator. Once the tokens run out, which is seemingly incalculable, the servers crash.

The only way to keep the servers up is to keep spending more money by increasing the tokens (by raising the capacity), even though I didn't need the extra capacity. My servers are running perfectly on another provider now, on the lowest capacity instances, with no concept of "tokens" to worry about.

1. We utilize EC2 services offered by Amazon for our container deployments through Docker in Testing & Production environments.

2. Since the infrastructure is provided by AWS, we needn't worry about regional downtime or security updates as they are fully managed by Amazon.

3. We define our docker containers within EC2 instance and we can trust in the isolation between the containers are properly maintained.

4. We can leverage to stop the EC2 instances in case we need to retain the application configurations for a later point in time and start it again for future use.

5. Hosting multiple backend cloud-based applications is feasible with EC2 and all configurational changes can be viewed completely in its CLI.

I've been using AWS for over 10 years and I don't remember having any problems, except for the ones I caused myself. It's extremely reliable, safe and affordable.