Amazon launched its cloud in 2006 and since then it has come to dominate the industry.
Very often people ask for reasons as to why they should consider AWS for their infrastructure needs. Other than the fact that their infrastructure-as-as-service (IaaS) is estimated to grow from $8.1B to $15.5B (91%); platform-as-a-service (PaaS) to see a growth of 50%; and software-as-a-service (SaaS) will jump up 52% (from $14.5B to $22.1B), it is obvious that Cloud computing is here to stay. Leveraging the benefits of AWS (like Netflix, Pinterest, Coursera, Reddit, Flipboard, etc., have) can dramatically increase both the effectiveness and efficiency of your company.
Its APIs are a class apart, almost all popular tech based start-ups have used or are using its services, and enterprises are piling into its low-cost infrastructure-as-a-service technology for everything; from basic storage to advanced data analytics. With its added super advantage of scale, it is gaining a lead over its competitors that may be hard for them to transcend.
If you still have concerns about cost, security, data privacy and many more issues, listed here are what we believe to be the top 10 benefits of using AWS for your infrastructure needs:
People tend to believe that AWS or any other cloud-based solutions are for the rich. However, the reality is quite opposite. AWS in fact helps in aiding start-ups to leverage high-end technologies and infrastructure needs with ZERO Capital Expenditure. Start-ups shying away from leveraging Oracle or any other commercial software that demands high-upfront licensing cost must explore AWS for an hourly priced model with no up-front cost.
What separates Amazon from other technology companies is that it comes from a retail background and is applying retail economics to cloud computing. These include price cuts; lowest-common-denominator services; only developing technologies when it can see definite demand; and forever identifying new potential consumers for its services and targeting them with technologies to make the transition to its cloud easier (such as its Virtual Private Cloud for enterprises or the Amazon Storage Gateway)
Because its cloud is so big, Amazon is able to monitor the types of jobs being run on it and launch products in response to customer demand. Amazon’s scale gives it a natural research and development advantage over its competitors.
In the cloud, the scale of the operation gives the operator a number of benefits — lower pricing for basic equipment, greater geographical reach, and a constant source of free research and development from seeing the types of applications and services users are building on it.
The kind of advantages Amazon enjoys from its scale are hard to quantify, but recent partnerships, technology developments and offerings by third-party companies give an idea:
Similarly, because of Amazon’s size it can attract customers that would otherwise have misgivings about the cloud. Netflix’s cloud architect, Adrian Cockcroft, said his company opted for Amazon because scale wouldn’t be a problem. (In 2011 Netflix accounted for nearly 30 percent of all download internet traffic in the US.)
Whether you require a server for hosting a small website, a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for heavy traffic sites, reliable & scalable email service, data warehousing service, or Hadoop cluster for your BigData needs, AWS offers everything with absolutely no-commitment at all, not even a month. All server-backed services are charged on hourly basis, so as soon as you terminate/stop a server, you won’t be billed from next hour.
Procuring a new server might take anywhere between several hours to 8-10 days depending upon whether your infrastructure is on-premise, co-located or if you are associated with a hosting provider. After that, you have to wait for days again to procure software licenses. AWS enables you to spin-up new servers within just a few minutes and eliminates the need to buy separate licenses.
Think of infinite space for your backup & archival needs, ability to launch new servers, up-scale/downscale a server, CDN integration, transcoding media files, unlimited bandwidth and many more highly scalable services/features available to you while you pay based on your actual usage only.
AWS has built a world class, highly secure infrastructure, both physically and over the internet. These include:
• Data centers that are staffed 24×7 by trained security guards, and access is authorized strictly on privilege basis
• Multiple geographic regions and Availability Zones allows AWS to remain resilient in the face of most failure modes, including natural disasters or system failures
• Ability to configure built-in firewall rules
• Leveraging Identity & Access Management (IAM) & CloudTrail to keep track of activities performed by users
• Few other highlights include private subnets, Multi-factor authentication (MFA), Isolate GovCloud& encrypted data storage
Forget about guess-work or scientific analysis to identify your infrastructure needs. You can leverage auto-scaling to build a self-managing infrastructure aligned closely to the actual need based on traffic/resources utilization. Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) enables users to spin-up clones in multiple regions for different environments within few minutes, eliminating the need to repeat the set-up steps every time.
AWS has come-up with highly scalable managed services for database, caching, data-warehousing, transcoding, storage, backup, infrastructure management & application management which decrease the overall time & effort spent in setting-up & managing the infrastructure and thereby considerably decreasing the go-to-market cycle for end-customers.
APIs are available in various programming languages to help you manage your infrastructure programmatically. Whether it means launching a new instance, or taking backups, everything is possible through API. In fact, APIs are more powerful than AWS Management Console.
As we can observe from the market share AWS continues to be one of the biggest cloud services provider eclipsing competition and maintaining a high market share.