Amazon EC2

Superb pricing. Very reliable. Lots of choices. Great dashboard tools. When connected with CloudWatch, monitoring is great. Tools for networking and security are very flexible. Perfect tool to pull out of the technical toolbox when you need a server.

The variety of choices and configuration options increases the level of complexity. Ideally you know what you're doing before you get started. Windows pricing is a bit steep, but one is better off not running servers on Windows anyways. For paying customers with a certain volume, they need to include a free support level that at least allows bug reporting. We pay them more than $10K/month, and it's crazy we can't even send them a support email or do a chat without paying hundreds more per month.

I liked the ease of upgrading your instance or adding volumes.

Pretty much everything else, all of terminology is foreign and complex, finding anything in the dashboard is absolute nightmare. The billing is not clear or transparent. If all you need is a server for your app/business this is not the place to go unless.

Amazon EC2 is an extremely flexible cloud computing service. It is modern, complete, integrates easily with all other AWS services and comes at a great price with an ever-decreasing pricing that will simply give the customer more value. If it is your first cloud computing experience, you can start with a template that will facilitate the process of getting started, however, be mindful because templates may tie you up considerably in the future. EC2 is all about standards so you can expect to integrate absolutely everything in your infrastructure with ease. EC2 is the reason why I think bare metal servers do not make a lot of sense nowadays.

Speaking about features, you've got them all and EC2 proves to be a nice gateway to keep using other AWS services. At first, it may be intimidating to implement since the interface is still a bit misleading. Once you understand it, you get your money worth by every penny. We started with EC2 almost 8 years ago and I absolutely haven't thought about replacing with an alternative for many years to come.

EC2 interface still has a lot of room for improvement. I think that since it is so expansive, fitting everything in concisely in an interface is hard. I think that it has gotten better over time but never to the likes of DigitalOcean that is a superb functional and well-designed UI.

Also, documentation is not very developer friendly (have you seen Mailgun's dev docs?) but it serves you well. Something there is documentation that is referring to another version of the service you are intending to use without you having a lot of notice, that's a catch.

You should also know that just like Apple's ecosystem, AWS is also playing the same game, very difficult to export things should you ever have the need, so make a commitment or find somewhere else.

Elastic Bean Stalk is a very simple and reliable platform as a service. You can configure various aspects of your application like deploy, autoscaling and database. Lambda is also an extremely useful resource for small service development without having to set up a complete framework for it.

Some functions are hard to learn like IAM for example. Also, managing costs well can be a challenge as there are many options to choose from.