Amazon Web Services

I appreciate AWS's scalability and flexibility. You can serve up as many instances as needed on-demand for lambdas, which significantly reduces costs by reducing charges to actual usage. This automatic scaling is available for other services as well, such as DynamoDB and Step Functions. Likewise, additional storage can be attached to and detached from EC2 instances based on requirements, without the need to create a new instance with a larger memory. Second, there is no upfront cost for compute or storage. The model is pay-as-you-go, and only resources that are being utilized are billed. Expenditures can be scaled up alongside the growth of the business. Finally, since we work on document intelligence, data security and governance is important. This is where AWS with its string security standards (ISO, SOC, etc.), built-in encryption and identity access management really shines.

Vendor has support teams available at various levels of response time and knowledge. Depending on customer's needs, support can be provided instantly and expertly.

Clear pricing plans and estimation tools. Offers elastic instances for ad-hoc, on-demand scenarios. Mobile app to monitor all your AWS services including instances, servers, virtual machines etc. You can also start/stop/restart/schedule servers as needed, just as you would on the desktop version of the AWS console.

AWS's vast array of services can be overwhelming and make for a steep learning curve. The AWS dashboard is not very intuitive when a procedural task needs to be done (such as choosing permissions or security groups for a specific service or resource). Cost management can be tricky since billing is based on usage. Pricing models are also complex as there are many storage tiers and data transfer fees. Thus, it is important to regularly manage and monitor resources to avoid unexpected costs.

Much of their documentation effort can't keep up with the speed of change to services and products. It feels like documentation is an afterthought, which is odd given the wealth of documentation they have available.

I can't really think of any negatives. Perhaps the menu UI could be overhauled a bit on the desktop console, however, say if you know what menu item you are looking for, then the search bar is there to type in the search item. Again this is on the proviso you know what you are looking for as initially the items are located under a section/sub-section and may not be obvious.