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Amazon AWS vs vCloud Air comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 16, 2024

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
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
258
Ranking in other categories
PaaS Clouds (2nd)
vCloud Air
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
21st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Database as a Service (DBaaS) (19th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 16.2%, up from 13.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of vCloud Air is 1.1%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon AWS16.2%
vCloud Air1.1%
Other82.7%
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
 

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.
SC
Director Solutions Architect - EMEA & APAC at Blue Medora
With the VPC, you can run your workloads in an active state, use it for development work and for hosting SQL/Exchange Servers in IaaS; RaaS/DaaS for DR activities.
All three components of the vCloud Air are equally valuable and important, i.e., IaaS, DaaS and RaaS. I like the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) offering compared to the Dedicated Cloud. It gives me the flexibility to utilize the pay-as-you-go option. You can run your workloads in an active state at reasonable prices. I have seen lots of companies use it for their development work, as well as for hosting SQL and Exchange Servers, i.e., in the active-passive mode instead of Replication (RaaS). Disaster Recovery is also a great feature that is affordable and easy to use. Disaster Recovery is a great component of the vCloud Air, where you can protect the on-premises cloud infrastructure, by providing self-service recovery options using the vSphere Replication. Some of the features that really stand out and I have used in my projects are: * Direct Connect: It provides high speed and private line connectivity. * Offline Data Transfer: For encrypted bulk data transport.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product's scalability is good."
"We deploy our core application and our integration platform on AWS EC2 instances. These applications contain multiple containerized Python Django applications, which need to scale up and down dynamically."
"Amazon AWS is a stable solution."
"The dashboard is very good, the solution in general is user-friendly and easy to navigate, the product as a whole is very intuitive, the initial setup was quite easy, the product is reliable and quite stable, and the solution is fine for static hosting."
"I use Amazon AWS to host services for my clients, as well as creating SMTP services for them."
"The most valuable feature is the availability, as we work in different availability zones."
"Our primary use case for Amazon AWS is for disaster recovery."
"We like the that, within the public subnet of this solution, a new instance of the tool is launched when it detects an issue, in order to prevent interruptions in performance."
"VMware Workstation has an interesting feature to manage vSphere infrastructure (and also stand-alone ESXi hosts) that is really powerful and useful, for example to avoid to install the vSphere client (or the integration plugin) just to open one VM console or to change the power status for some VM."
"The Cloud DRaaS solution provided the organization with new levels of flexibility and cost control, together with rapid expansion capability."
"This is the part that should be making admins and CIOs smile."
 

Cons

"When the solution faces downtime, it can be for hours or half a day."
"It's expensive. It costs you an arm and a leg."
"It's expensive. It should be cheaper."
"The sorting model in AWS is a little bit complicated. When you are going through any component, you can get some surprising results."
"Our use case is limited to virtual services and RPA development. We are not using it quite heavily, and there are not many issues or problems so far. However, it would be great if it could be integrated with more AI features and proactive monitoring. It could also have more automatic capacity expansion features. For example, when renting out some space, memory, or computing power, the service can have the capacity to expand by itself without being manually handled by us."
"The connection between the billing console and the management console is not obvious so shutting down a machine was hard to find initially and resulted in excess billing."
"The pricing of AWS is very unclear. They make it quite confusing."
"I generally don't like the user experience of Amazon. It's not the best."
"It’s a really good idea, but the current implementation is very limited: you can simply see your VMs and just open the VM console."
"I don’t think it is quite where EC2 is with regard to capabilities and features but VMware is investing a lot in vCloud Air."
"I feel the user interface/portal can be improved further. I did experience timeout issues and the UI was performing slowly at times."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Amazon AWS has pay-as-you-go options available."
"It seems to be reasonable. It's the first one that I've used as a cloud platform, so they've set the benchmark for me, and now, I'm comparing everything else to them."
"Its price is kind of okay. When we do a migration from on-premises to the cloud, we typically use the lift-and-shift model. Based on the studies that we have done, cost savings are definitely there when we moved from on-premises to the cloud."
"Some customers will provide their own license and others will purchase it directly from AWS."
"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."
"It can get quite pricey at times."
"It's a pay-per-use model."
"The solution's pricing depends on your traffic since they charge you based on the traffic, not the servers. The price can go into many, many thousands depending on the traffic."
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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
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Educational Organization
6%
Computer Software Company
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business131
Midsize Enterprise48
Large Enterprise114
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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Also Known As

Amazon Web Services, AWS
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.
Lumeta, LifeSite, Clear Tec Solutions, National Physician Services, Queens University of Charlotte, California Natural Resources Agency, Pacific Disaster Center, Seventy Seven Energy Inc., Columbia Sportswear , CSS Corp
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and others in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS). Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.