153 engineers on Hacker News describe using Amazon EC2 first-hand: 29 endorse it, 13 regret it, 8 are mixed.
“It spawns ephemeral EC2/Azure instances, which is a lot cheaper than the GitHub actions runners we used before that.”
endorse · production · Jarred · 2026-07-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We had no problems with EC2 VMs.”
endorse · production · pmontra · 2025-11-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've had to deploy to EC2 over the years and every method is a pain.”
regret · production · raw_anon_1111 · 2025-10-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We ditched it for EC2s which were faster and more reliable while being cheaper, but that's beside the point.”
endorse · production · jeffhuys · 2025-09-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we use EC2 and VMs from other clouds with a bunch of shell scripts for automation.”
endorse · production · ghoshbishakh · 2024-06-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Now that we've moved to EC2-based VMs the only problems I have to deal with are minikube problems”
endorse · production · ranger207 · 2023-08-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we moved to m6i which isn't ARM based but does leverage nitro. We saw substantial improvements in that configuration too.”
endorse · production · notyourwork · 2023-03-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“for spot instances in EC2 we've found better pricing and greater availability by staying on x86.”
endorse · production · phamilton · 2022-11-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Ec2 is a very stable system and we keep making it more stable for our customers. Do use it.”
endorse · production · yolovoe · 2022-11-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run a very large installation 100% on spot and have done for a few years. We serve our web traffic, do background work, etc.”
endorse · production · 3 yr · phamilton · 2022-10-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run all our web traffic on spot instances, for example.”
endorse · production · phamilton · 2021-11-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched to a traditional webserver on regular EC2 instances and haven't looked back.”
endorse · production · VWWHFSfQ · 2021-10-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it makes it incredibly simple to roll back - if a release goes wrong, just spin up new EC2s using the previous AMI”
endorse · production · bedobi · 2021-03-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Only migrating it to a regular EC2 instance had any results and they were dramatic.”
endorse · production · gtsteve · 2020-08-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We moved off of T2's and back to C's because of the unpredictable behavior under load.”
mixed · production · cle · 2019-12-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“By sticking to shards that are 10-100GB, and only using i3 instances, you can get great performance.”
endorse · production · __blockcipher__ · 2019-12-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“One AZ in us-west-1 didn't have enough capacity of that SKU. ... We switched to EBS-based instances after this”
regret · production · lflux · 2019-10-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Occasionally it would lock up or go down, for whatever reason, creating chaos for the servers that needed specific jobs run frequently.”
regret · production · ordinaryperson · 2019-09-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“small chunks of memory would randomly get overwritten on PV-virtualized AWS instances, but not on HVM-virtualized instances. ... we migrated all our instances to be HVM-only”
regret · production · ak217 · 2019-05-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we switched from ECS without Fargate (managing our own EC2 instanced)”
regret · production · jacobkg · 2019-04-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run an auto-scaled pool of C5 instances that host stateless containerized services. They are substantially cheaper than the x86 options.”
endorse · production · rbranson · 2018-11-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“By using EC2 we can configure our machines in ways we wouldn't be able to if we used RDS.”
endorse · production · malisper · 2018-09-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“EC2 reservations are still a Godsend compared to some other offerings out there”
endorse · production · endymi0n · 2017-09-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We started deploying our Kafka cluster as a set of N EC2 instances but we started running into a bunch of issues”
regret · production · TheHydroImpulse · 2017-05-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I think 80% of our stuff would be better off in the racks”
mixed · production · cookiecaper · 2016-12-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Amazon has degraded service on the EC2 API in us-east-1 that used to cause us downtime”
regret · production · jzelinskie · 2016-11-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run a bunch of production workloads on them... This is over a year now and only once did I have any sort of interruption”
endorse · production · 1 yr · mattkrea · 2016-07-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We would occasionally see disk writes on EC2 hang for long enough that the in-kernel (64k) pipe buffer would fill up”
regret · production · ebroder · 2015-09-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the deep integration between things like autoscaling groups, EC2, ELB, etc makes it easy to automate all the things”
endorse · production · NathanKP · 2015-07-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“EC2 allows us to spin up instances fast. If someone needs 10 15GB containers launched, the EC2 instances can be provisioned in a couple minutes”
endorse · production · mdasen · 2015-05-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I run an environment that scales to around 1,000 EC2 instances daily. ...we have switched to all 12-month reservations (We would lose many machines to a spot outage)”
mixed · production · samstave · 2015-03-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I don't have to autoscale with the crude primitive of an instance in production.”
regret · production · eropple · 2015-02-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“on the i2 instances on AWS that have high performance ephemeral SSD arrays. Our benchmarks of the i2s show their IO performance is quite good”
endorse · production · mrkurt · 2015-01-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“all EC2 amis use ebs backed instances... But an instance-backed ami would be nice.”
mixed · production · rckclmbr · 2014-07-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run our own database on EC2 and it works fine.”
endorse · production · jordanthoms · 2014-06-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“on heavy reservations you pay per-hour even if you're not using the machine. ... So keep that in mind when planning out your reservations.”
regret · production · nirvdrum · 2014-03-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Seems like we get 2-3 EC2 price cuts every year, and S3 continues to get cheaper.”
endorse · production · gtaylor · 2013-11-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The cr1.8xlarge has fantastic performance... It's also very expensive... it's definitely a sore-point in our budget.”
mixed · production · vosper · 2013-11-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“with virtually any other provider you can pick a configuration that matches the needs of your app, don't have to fight with CPU steal”
regret · production · nirvdrum · 2013-06-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I consider FreeBSD/EC2 production ready -- and I'm using it in production”
endorse · production · cperciva · 2012-11-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Amazon cloud is great but in order to make your service highly available you do need to have standby system on some other cloud”
mixed · production · sdizdar · 2012-10-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Since we moved to EC2, updating is simpler. The service runs on a micro instance.”
endorse · production · cwp · 2012-07-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the APIs we use - EC2 and Github, are largely bulletproof so long as the service isn't experiencing failures.”
endorse · production · pbiggar · 2012-03-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using a Micro Instance for almost a year (the free tier) to run http://nsfw.in/ successfully.”
endorse · production · 1 yr · Brajeshwar · 2011-12-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The importance of the short release cycle has decreased a lot for us since we moved to EC2. It's really simple to re-deploy the entire infrastructure”
endorse · production · dialtone · 2011-05-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“And will consider moving out of EC2, if possible.”
regret · production · blr_hack · 2010-12-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use EC2 almost exclusively but do run some instances on Terremark”
mixed · production · devspade · 2010-11-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I did not have a good experience. Seemed much slower than my RackSpace equivalent and so I switched back to RackSpace.”
regret · personal · dennyferra · 2010-11-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched to an EC2 Large instance in order to avoid this limitation and properly test the service.”
mixed · production · cscotta · 2010-08-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched to EC2 and starting paying a bit more, but we've been able to expand capacity much more nimbly than before.”
endorse · production · mmastrac · 2010-04-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I had an issue like this for optimizing pgrust... no impact on my test machine (c8g.4xl)”
neutral · production · malisper · 2026-08-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We went with the AWS instance they recommended in the docs and even that went over our provisioned memory.”
neutral · production · 0.5 yr · simplesocieties · 2026-06-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we moved to a fully in-house solution with Firecracker and auto-scaling on EC2”
neutral · production · Reformedot · 2026-06-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“our data stores are all self-managed on top of EC2/Azure, where performance and reliability are critical.”
neutral · production · scott_w · 2025-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I'm able to set up AWS EC2 instances or digital ocean droplets, a bunch of game servers spin up”
neutral · personal · sovietmudkipz · 2025-12-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it should be possible to convert such EC2 boxes into Kubernetes nodes”
neutral · production · pxc · 2025-12-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The whole thing happily ran on three EC2 micro instances”
neutral · production · Moto7451 · 2025-02-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“our costs went from $6K/month (on savings plans, evemn) of ec2 to ~$400/month in lambda”
neutral · production · hylaride · 2025-01-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run EC2 instances with a setup shell script under 50loc. We autoscale up to 40-50 web servers at peak load”
neutral · production · donatj · 2024-11-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We are on a mix of AWS EC2 and EKS now, all autoscaled per region (we run 20+ of them).”
neutral · production · tnolet · 2024-06-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I also remember working on getting LFS work on AWS EC2 back then.”
neutral · personal · 120bits · 2023-09-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“availability of capacity is a problem in some regions/AZs - particularly if you're using larger EC2 instance types.”
neutral · production · beaviskhan · 2022-11-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we migrated from the datacenter to AWS EC2 instances”
neutral · production · pwinnski · 2022-09-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We have around 30 EC2 instances running currently but will be scaling that up further.”
neutral · production · xwowsersx · 2022-09-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've done EC2 auto-scaling with ansible and packer”
neutral · production · yashap · 2022-08-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we switched from self-managed k8s on EC2 to Fargate.”
neutral · production · sk8serboi · 2022-06-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I recently moved the infrastructure for one of my company's products, from ~10 smallish EC2 VMs”
neutral · production · mwcampbell · 2022-02-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we've upgraded to a newer generation of EC2 instances that has lower latency, and could he please run those numbers again.”
neutral · production · hinkley · 2021-12-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“versus the current m5 RDS and other EC2 instances.”
neutral · production · InvaderFizz · 2021-12-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we recently adopted AWS Single Sign-On and EC2 Instance Connect.”
neutral · production · chakspak · 2021-12-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“an EC2 instance way bigger than necessary to run this sort of code”
neutral · production · what_is_orcas · 2021-11-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I was part of a team at NearForm using this for a project on an EC2 instance.”
neutral · production · Codesleuth · 2021-04-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“ec2 auto scaling groups were working reasonably well for us”
neutral · production · jacobr1 · 2021-01-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“EC2 (Pet VMs and one autoscaling group of VMs to process data”
neutral · production · scarface74 · 2020-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I saw various PR/FAQs related to Chaos engineering while I worked in both EC2 and the AWS developer tools org.”
neutral · production · discodave · 2020-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run certbot from an AWS instance that exists for about 10 minutes/day.”
neutral · personal · rabidrat · 2020-09-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Pay for a managed NAT gateway? No thanks I can do the NAT myself with iptables on a cheaper EC2 instance.”
neutral · production · Galanwe · 2020-09-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run production webservers on t2.small ec2 instances in elastic beanstalk”
neutral · production · ramraj07 · 2020-09-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run over 900 very stateful MySQL database clusters ... in kubernetes on ec2 with ebs successfully.”
neutral · production · paulfurtado · 2020-08-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched most our workloads from k8s to ECS (mix of EC2/Fargate launch types)”
neutral · production · nuker · 2020-08-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we just add significantly over provisioned spot instances for our best estimates of yearly growth”
neutral · production · bigiain · 2020-07-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“which has 4 x ec2 nodes with 8 CPUs and 32 Gb RAM.”
neutral · production · sytringy05 · 2020-05-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I just installed it directly on a EC2 t3.small instance and we've been using it for about 9 months now”
neutral · production · 0.75 yr · bob1029 · 2019-12-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the EC2s that run these services in prod are all RHEL based”
neutral · production · ActorNightly · 2019-11-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run of Elastic Beanstalk, which is basically an abstraction later on top of an autoscaling EC2 cluster.”
neutral · production · cj · 2019-09-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“reddit's last datacenter before we moved to EC2.”
neutral · production · jedberg · 2019-08-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Databases that have huge IOPS requirements are still deployed outside of Kubernetes and run in i3 instances.”
neutral · production · DasIch · 2018-12-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“For work, we use Concourse-CI self-hosted on EC2 using this script”
neutral · production · karmakaze · 2018-12-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“switched to virtualenv in my ec2 deployments”
neutral · production · wuliwong · 2018-12-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We have an existing production system that uses a combination of SQS, DynamoDB, and Postgres, and EC2s”
neutral · production · bballer · 2018-11-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run it in a t2.small instance along with another tool.”
neutral · production · gldalmaso · 2018-11-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We do ~200K requests/min on AWS c5.4xlarges and r5.2xlarges”
neutral · production · esilverberg2 · 2018-10-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Our servers usually run just fine on micro-instances.”
neutral · production · danieka · 2017-11-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“spin up a new ec2 instance, attach the available volume, process some logs from it and then delete the new ec2 instance”
neutral · production · jpetersonmn · 2017-11-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we've had to do several manual db upgrades in that time”
neutral · production · encoderer · 2017-06-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“trying to match up Reserved instances with EC2 or Elastic Beanstalk instances that are actually running is a real headache.”
neutral · production · cyberferret · 2017-05-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run specific components of our application in spot instances across different regions”
neutral · production · jfroma · 2017-04-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“running ZFS on Linux in production since April 2015 on over 1500 instances in AWS EC2 with Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04”
neutral · production · 1.7 yr · tnorgaard · 2016-12-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use our own install of Drone on a fairly sizable EC2 instance”
neutral · production · donatj · 2016-12-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“a single developer or build slave has used 40 machines at once to run these tests”
neutral · production · adamb · 2016-07-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Packer uses Puppet to provision a Vagrant box and an identical EC2 AMI.”
neutral · production · ncallaway · 2015-11-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run it on EC2 i2.8xlarge instances and it finishes in under 2 hours.”
neutral · production · RyanGWU82 · 2015-11-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have react-ui-builder running on an ec2 instance so I can switch to it between computers”
neutral · production · izyda · 2015-07-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“At my current employer, we run about 10k+ EC2 instances 24/7.”
neutral · production · rb2k_ · 2015-07-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run all our ec2 instances on ephemeral disk instances.”
neutral · production · helper · 2015-01-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We bake our Docker host AMIs relatively regularly and use them in the ASG that runs the Dockerized website.”
neutral · production · boffbowsh · 2014-12-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Boot up instances of everything in the VPC ... Shutdown everything in EC2 classic.”
neutral · production · roncohen · 2014-10-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I just reserved all my t1's last week.”
neutral · production · gimliclc · 2014-07-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run hundreds of GlusterFS clusters in production on EC2.”
neutral · production · syrneus · 2014-05-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“our m1.xlarge servers were constantly pegged for CPU”
neutral · production · bbeaudreault · 2014-04-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“both hlld and bloomd are running on a single m3.medium with no persistence”
neutral · production · 2 yr · mitchellh · 2014-04-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We're a small team and ... we have only just begun experimenting with actual deployment in a test environment on ec2.”
neutral · personal · markbnj · 2014-03-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have seen from any host that I've used in nearly a decade, including ec2, rackspace, and gogrid”
neutral · production · AJ007 · 2014-02-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we just provision a new EC2 instance with Vagrant/Chef and it auto-joins the cluster.”
neutral · production · saryant · 2014-01-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“make it easy to set up an S3 bucket as a "local" pip mirror for our EC2 infrastructure”
neutral · production · themartorana · 2014-01-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We migrated our entire infrastructure from EC2 to DigitalOcean around October(ish?) 2013.”
neutral · production · quickdry21 · 2014-01-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“log in to our staging machine (an EC2 instance) and interact with our production cluster”
neutral · production · saryant · 2013-12-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Our cassandra cluster is on EC2 (~11ms away from our other hardware, which is in LA).”
neutral · production · metabrew · 2013-11-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“responses that are cached using fragment caching are rendered in 5-8ms usually on a micro EC2 instance”
neutral · production · rartichoke · 2013-11-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run all our production software on EC2.”
neutral · production · dmourati · 2013-11-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use a handful of their services including EC2.”
neutral · production · 2 yr · jmathai · 2013-11-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Currently we run our Postgres instances on EC2, but are looking to move to get better IOPS.”
neutral · production · rpedela · 2013-06-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“During the course of a day, the number of EC2 instances running can vary from 8 to 25.”
neutral · production · bad_user · 2013-06-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run our one stack that requires a lot of storage on EC2 and use EBS”
neutral · production · sstrudeau · 2013-04-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we had to re-run all the tests, which is a time consuming process, especially on the EC2 hardware.”
neutral · production · pfalls · 2013-04-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We do use EC2 for cron, but could easily use a laptop instead if there were an outage.”
neutral · production · jeremyjbowers · 2013-02-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we rigged up a sacrificial web app that we run on random EC2 instances and have candidates take an hour or two”
neutral · production · tptacek · 2013-02-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we need to use 2 large EC2 instances in the day time.”
neutral · production · rehack · 2013-01-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using an ec2 image with Poptop installed. The problem is the IP addresses of the major vpns become known and blocked.”
neutral · personal · aneth4 · 2012-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Thousands of requests/sec on an EC2 Small at < 10% load.”
neutral · production · decktech · 2012-12-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we run cloudant clusters in nearly 20 data centers globally on many different providers (ec2, softlayer, rackspace, joyent, azure, hostway, ...)”
neutral · production · mlmilleratmit · 2012-12-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We've been using Joyent in production for close to a year (coming from dedicated servers and EC2)”
neutral · production · james33 · 2012-11-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we occasionally drop down to Java for some libraries (EC2 comes to mind)”
neutral · production · pbiggar · 2012-11-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“sockjs-tornado behind haproxy (on the same ec2 m1.large machine)”
neutral · production · RoboTeddy · 2012-11-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I determined the service was no longer worth my time and booted up an EC2 instance.”
neutral · personal · andrewguenther · 2012-11-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Our Linux instances running on Amazon EC2 had no issues since we are not running ntpd on these servers”
neutral · production · sayeed · 2012-07-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we run a mid-sized deployment on EC2 (~60 instances) and anything interactive has to go on at least m1.large”
neutral · production · moe · 2012-04-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We were running running MongoDB atop EC2 instances.”
neutral · production · mitchellh · 2012-04-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“which we'd run in an AWS EC2 instance for testing”
neutral · personal · moonlighter · 2012-01-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we run CentOS 5 on EC2 instead of Amazon Linux because we actually run a hybrid local-node/EC2-cluster”
neutral · production · jeramey · 2011-12-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“various cloud based systems (EC2, Rackspacecloud, et al.) for testing and non-mission-critical stuff.”
neutral · production · dpaessler · 2011-12-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“They had noticed I was using Amazon EC2”
neutral · personal · fjarlq · 2011-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“If you're running any type of a database or service on EC2 where latency is an issue, you should be using ephemeral/instance storage.”
neutral · production · joevandyk · 2011-11-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“In full disclosure I run my personal blog off an Amazon Micro instance.”
neutral · personal · nckbz · 2011-10-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've used both and performance-wise my team didn't see any drastic differences. We switched to EC2 mostly because of RightScale”
neutral · production · djjose · 2011-04-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use regular AMIs. What we do is add management around it to make it into the 'lab' type environment.”
neutral · production · LabSlice · 2010-12-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Also I chose to add network latency by doing it on amazon instance.”
neutral · personal · yashh · 2010-12-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Cheap, available to any EC2 instance, and we never have to worry about DB maintenance or failures.”
neutral · production · crcastle · 2010-10-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use Nagios to monitor our EC2 servers (CPU, etc.) and then AlertFox for external transaction monitoring.”
neutral · production · timnyc · 2010-10-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use Nagios to monitor our EC2 servers (CPU, etc.)”
neutral · production · tim1 · 2010-10-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“in our experience it was a lot cheaper than EC2”
neutral · personal · rkalla · 2010-06-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we have an ec2 instance dedicated for pairing which everyone has access to.”
neutral · production · matthewcford · 2010-05-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?