VirtualBox vs Amazon EC2: Which is a better fit?

Speaker 1: Hi, my name is Grant. I'm a Senior Cloud Engineer. I would give VirtualBox a rating of three out of five stars. Click below for more reviews like this. Previously to using VirtualBox, we tried a few different other platforms in order to virtualize a testing environment. I would say that VirtualBox definitely has its limitations, but we found it to be pretty good. We chose VirtualBox after looking around on the market and we found not only was it free, and it seemed to be quite well-maintained and up-to-date, the product just seemed to work for us, pretty good. We found getting started with VirtualBox pretty simple. It's not exactly difficult to get installed on either a Mac or a Windows machine. I mean, we were up and running within a few days. I would say to anyone looking around, VirtualBox is definitely one to look at. It does have some limitations, compared to its competitors. But purely due to the fact that it's, number one, free, and number two, highly maintained and up to date, definitely have a look at it.

Justin: Hi, I'm Justin, DevOps Engineer, and I give O'Reilly Learning Platform four out of five stars. For more reviews like these, please click the link below. Before using O'Reilly, I used a couple of different resources. First, classic paper books. Great as a resource, poor at aging. In this day and age, especially with DevOps technology, paper books age like you wouldn't believe, and use something that was a little bit more up to date. So I tried other learning platforms like A Cloud Guru and Lennox Academy. Great video content, up to date a little bit more, but they didn't have the depth of books. So I needed to have something that gave me access to a lot of books that was very in-depth and up to date. I looked at O'Reilly because I'm familiar with a lot of their books. Over the years I've used I don't know how many O'Reilly books. So I figured they had a service Safari, it is what it used to be called. They've since morphed it into O'Reilly Learning Platform, where they give you so much more than just books. For one subscription, you get access to a whole treasure trove of 200 plus publishers, plus video courses, plus live events you can go to. Nothing else even comes close in terms of the breadth of knowledge you get and the amount of learning styles it covers. Getting started with O'Reilly was pretty simple. They have a great search feature and you can put in a topic like AWS or Linux, and you can see the different types of content that they have. Not just books, but also video series, and talks that are coming up, and all that kind of stuff. You can also search for specific technical questions like, How do I write a for loop in Python? And O'Reilly search is smart enough to know where you need to look for that. Not only in books, but also in videos too, which is really nice. If you're thinking about getting O'Reilly, there are two things you ought to know. First, unlike some digital platforms that give you access to books, you don't get to keep any of the books you have access to. I think PAC and a couple of others tended to do this at least at one point. The other thing is, O'Reilly does not have any sort of cloud-based sandboxes right now. Like A Cloud Guru has a feature where you can spin up a new AWS account just for your personal experimentation for free and try stuff out in it. O'Reilly has sandboxes of their own, but they're basically like individual servers. As far as getting an actual cloud account, that feature is in beta; but as of today, that's not currently available.