Amazon Web Services (AWS)

The move to cloud computing is considered one of the most innovative technological advances of the 21st century. And Amazon.com spearheaded that advance. Amazon.com is the world’s largest e-commerce retailer. It was Amazon’s vast global business that drove the company to seek the best technological infrastructure and solutions to operate and manage its own ever-expanding enterprise. Once Amazon cloud computing had proved itself as a reliable platform on which Amazon.com could run its daily operations, Amazon made the decision to share its technological breakthrough with other enterprises.  This service is known as Amazon Web Services or just AWS.

Four main reasons enterprises choose to use Amazon web services are low cost, the ability to instantly scale up or scale down computing resources, a reliable and secure computing platform, and the capacity for running whatever operating system and programming model an enterprise desires.

Amazon web services are currently utilized by thousands of businesses across the world. Data centers and servers are geographically dispersed so that enterprises may be serviced by data centers located in their region. Multiple data centers also make it possible for users to easily and quickly store additional instances of their applications and data in multiple locations as protection in the event of technical failure or disaster.

In today’s challenging economic environment, businesses need to invest their time and money wisely. In order to streamline a business and maximize sales, business applications are required. Enterprise-level stand-alone business applications are costly. Furthermore, running an internal data center is expensive, time-consuming, and complex. Operating a data center requires office space, building space, power, cooling, bandwidth, networks, servers and storage, software stacks, a team of IT techs, development, testing, staging, off-site data backup, power supply backup, troubleshooting, maintenance, and more. Time and money spent meeting the demands of running an internal data center could be better allocated to business planning and development.

When a business of any size elects to use Amazon cloud services, it gains access to an extensive array of affordable products and services that can be deployed to meet needs in the following categories: Compute, Content Delivery, Database, Deployment and Management, Messaging, Networking, Payments and Billing, Storage, Support, Web Traffic, and Workforce. It is no longer necessary for the business to purchase servers, backup drives, and software; these resources are provided through Amazon. Nor does the business need to initiate upgrades or database backups; Amazon web services perform these tasks automatically.

Another advantage to using Amazon web services is that a business only pays for what it uses. Businesses buy computing power by the hour, bandwidth by the GB, and storage space by the GB per month. Service is highly scalable. A business can use fifty servers one minute, scale up to a thousand servers a few minutes later, and scale down to twenty servers once the computing demand has diminished. What’s more, Amazon web services can be configured to manage scaling automatically. With the click of a mouse, a customer can add a firewall, a load balancer, or many other products and services available from Amazon.

A few of the most popular Amazon cloud computing products and services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon CloudFront, and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). Amazon EC2 provides computing resources that are both scalable and priced according to usage. Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS are two different types of storage systems – each suited to different applications. Auto Scale automatically increases or decreases the amount of computing power allocated to keep your applications running seamlessly. Elastic Load Balancing spreads incoming traffic demands across multiple instances of EC2. Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service for other Amazon web services. Amazon CloudFront makes it possible to deliver content – such as videos – across the internet with very low latency. And Amazon VPC makes it possible for enterprises to set up their own private clouds within Amazon’s cloud. For more in-depth descriptions or these products and services plus others, please refer to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) website.

Amazon pioneered the development and implementation of cloud computing technologies and remains a respected and customer-centric leader in this field today. However, other well-established companies have successfully entered this market and offer similar products and services. A business considering a move to cloud computing would be advised to explore the numerous options and pricing plans available at this time.