No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Amazon AWS vs Rackspace Cloud [EOL] comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon AWS
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
260
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (2nd), PaaS Clouds (2nd)
Rackspace Cloud [EOL]
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Q&A Highlights

AS
Community Manager at PeerSpot (formerly IT Central Station)
Aug 21, 2014
 

Featured Reviews

Asif  Meem - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Machine Learning Engineer at sportsbet
Managed cloud services have helped accelerate experiments with flexible configuration options
Sometimes the costs associated with spinning up a service, especially managed services, have implications. For example, if I create a Glue job, that will create S3 buckets and other resources that have cost implications, but once I clean up a Glue job, it does not delete the other accessory resources. Sometimes, I have to go hunting for what resources Amazon AWS might have provisioned and how it is costing behind the scenes. It can be complex depending on your level of expertise. It is not as easy to get started, especially when it comes to secure practices. Amazon AWS is more hands-on than other platforms.
RS
Director - DevOps and Infrastructure at INTIGRAL
There is easy integration with multiple providers and third-party services
It is very stable. It works 99.9 percent of the time. We are quite happy with it. This product is used to help broadcast football games' live streams, video matches and fantasy games, and it is used extensively. We have almost two million plus downloads, and during peak seasons, we could have 100,000 concurrent users watching 11 different matches.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable feature is scalability, as it is very easy to scale."
"Overall, the solution is quite complete."
"We pretty much like everything and we are excited about the seamless capability the EC2 service is offering."
"We use AWS for multiple purposes, such as developing APIs and API integration using API Gateway. We use API Gateway, Python Combinator, Lambda Glue, and ETL Process. We have used EMR for big data processing. If we need a tool for computing, we go with the Lamda DMS. There are many services available in AWS that meet our needs."
"Having a cloud available has been great; it makes things faster and easier and the deployment is pretty quick and very straightforward."
"I am happy with the dashboard."
"One of the most valuable features is that Amazon AWS has a lot of data centers and regions where we can position our virtual machines for leverage. Amazon AWS is also easy to use. You can quickly spin up something, use Explorer, building proofs of concept, things like that. Once the proof of concept is built once and we know how things are going to look from a production perspective, we try to move everything to the data centers. These features and the ease of use are the main reasons why we use AWS."
"When we removed ECS, we moved into a serverless Lambda for 45 million, and our billing is now $8000 per month, which is an amazing amount of savings."
"There is easy integration with multiple providers and third-party services."
"The tourism business is seasonally based, therefore our infrastructure needs are variable, and this service works perfectly for us."
"The new generation of Rackspace Cloud servers are a strong improvement over the first generation."
"It is very stable; it works 99.9 percent of the time, and we are quite happy with it."
"The most valuable feature for us is the support, which is really efficient."
"Image backup is a valuable feature, and even though this is a common feature, it is very helpful for us."
"Ability to quickly create reliable virtual servers."
 

Cons

"An area for improvement would be API creation - a lot of tools are provided, but there can be issues with integrating them."
"Setup is somewhat complex."
"It is difficult to hand over legacy applications when migrating them to the cloud."
"We have had several issues with the products and services but as of now, there are no good alternatives."
"With the introduction of Glacier as a long-term storage option, having some type of function key to simplify the transfer of files between the S3 and Glacier environments would be beneficial and increase efficiency."
"An integrated platform would make it easier for administrators to monitor and manage."
"You'll probably experience some sticker shock with AWS. You attempt to understand the cost, but you don't realize what you're paying until you get your first bill. I don't know if Amazon does that on purpose, but costs can get out of control quickly if you don't have someone who specializes in AWS cost management."
"Amazon AWS is a very poor product for students. Microsoft Azure is a better solution."
"I had a few instances where techs on off hours made extremely bad decisions, resulting in extended site outages lasting hours."
"Vertical scalability is very limited compared with Amazon EC2, which offers many sorts of instances."
"It would be nice to have more built-in suites compared to others. It would enable easier integration."
"Comparatively, this solution is a bit expensive."
"It doesn't offer Elastic IP like AWS. And also we can't configure our server based on region."
"It's often difficult to get timely support with a ticket, they seem to live by phone calls there."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing of Amazon AWS is high compared to any other cloud provider."
"It is much more expensive than any other cloud provider."
"When you compare Amazon AWS to Microsoft Azure, the pricing of both is almost the same. There are some instances when one is cheaper than the other in one area but it is difficult to pinpoint which one is cheaper because it depends upon a lot of factors, such as the use case. However, the overall price of both solutions could be reduced."
"The price is good and licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis."
"Its pricing can be simplified a little bit more. Even though they have been reducing it, I still believe they can do better as compared to GCP, Google Cloud."
"The price, in general, could be better."
"There are many variables involved in pricing service in AWS and overall the pricing is a bit on the higher side."
"The pricing of AWS was attractive for us, so that's something that's okay at least for this transaction-based system. However, we still have some concerns about more data-driven applications or those that involve a lot of heavy uploading and downloading. So our whole data warehouse is still something that would not go into the cloud because of the pricing model."
"The service includes licenses (for operating systems, databases, etc.). Asset management is easier with services like that."
"Comparatively, this solution is a bit expensive."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which PaaS Clouds solutions are best for your needs.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user8586 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
Aug 14, 2013
Amazon vs Rackspace vs Microsoft vs Google: Cloud Hosting Services Comparison
Amazon Web Services, Rackspace OpenStack, Microsoft Windows Azure and Google are the major cloud hosting and storage service providers. Athough Amazon is top of them and is oldest in cloud market, Rackspace, Microsoft and Google are giving tough competition to each other and to Amazon also for…
 

Answers from the Community

AS
Community Manager at PeerSpot (formerly IT Central Station)
Aug 21, 2014
Aug 21, 2014
Agree. All those are not true cloud player but somewhere in between hosted cloud and true cloud computing.
2 out of 4 answers
it_user105252 - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO at a healthcare company with 51-200 employees
Aug 20, 2014
I completely agree. Cloud Computing vending is a scale business. And unless you have the $$ Billions to invest in DCs, interconnects, CDN capacity, as well as in continually investing in the OS and Management software infrastructure, you cannot be anything but a vendor that caters to a particular narrow segment. Its a bit like telephony. You aren't going to do very well going up against GE/Sprint, ATT or Southwest Telecom. BUT if you are an EarthLink, you can play in then niche space of those who want a "socially responsible" Telco. About a year ago, both Rackspace and Centurylink were looking for "capital partners" for future growth investment precisely because of these issues. I don't think they ever raised enough $$. I have been saying for about 5 years now that there is room for 4-5 major cloud vendors and they were going to be: Amazon, Google, Microsoft. and then fighting for the last 1-2 slots were IBM, salesFORCE.com, EMC and perhaps Oracle. Oracle seems to have opted not to keep fighting, and EMC is now more focused on delivering services. So you basically have IBM leveraging its corporate DC and mainframe hardware consolidation capabilities and Salesforce is leverging its lead in CRM to get apps built on Force.com But pretty much everyone else is a niche player. The Future is Platform As A Service. NOT "vms" and Rackspace and Dimension Data all were hoping to move from VMs to PaaS but that's a hard move to make.
it_user8685 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Expert at Cloud Counselage Inc. (www.cloudcounselage.com)
Aug 20, 2014
DISAGREE. VMware is the present and the Future. Be it VMware vCloud and vSphere suites, tough competition for Amazon etc. or be it vCHS. Also, VMware's very own Public IaaS Cloud; vCHS (VMware vCloud Hybrid Service) which will change everything in days to come vis-a-vis Rackspace, IBM's Softlayer etc. Microsoft is not in a competition at all, because it lacks quality compared to the names mentioned above. __Tushar Topale
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business131
Midsize Enterprise48
Large Enterprise120
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise2
 

Questions from the Community

How does OpenShift compare with Amazon AWS?
Open Shift makes managing infrastructure easy because of self-healing and automatic scaling. There is also a wonderful dashboard mechanism to alert us in case the application is over-committing or ...
How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS?
How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS? Amazon AWS offers options both in terms of upgrading and expanding capabilities as well as acquiring greater storage space. These upgrades can ...
Looking to compare Google Firebase, Amazon AWS, and Microsoft Azure
We like Google Firebase hosting and authentication and also the excellent cloud functionality. Our team found the flexibility of handling and dealing with the database through EDL to be very useful...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

Amazon Web Services, AWS
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.
3D Capacity, Acquity Group, Axios Systems, Behance, Blastro, Dominos Pizza, and Sage.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Red Hat and others in PaaS Clouds. Updated: May 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.