Amazon describes its Amazon Web Services (AWS) as “Born from Retail, Built for Retailers”. The reason AWS says this with such pride is because they have gained tremendous experience from running and managing the digital infrastructure of one of the largest and most successful retailers in the world – Amazon.com. Since its inception in 2004, AWS has grown to over 1 million customers across 190 countries. The company continues to hold the top position in the cloud market to date. So why is Amazon Web Services so successful? This is due to the fact that they have used their experience from managing Amazon.com to good use in building Cloud solutions that are extremely beneficial to your business.
Here are the 6 benefits of AWS offers, which your business can leverage:
Cost savings
As a business leader, the first thing you will consider when thinking about the cloud are costs. We all want a high-quality solution, at the same time we don’t want it to break the bank. Taking this into consideration AWS provides variable resource provisioning. This allows enterprises to scale up or down based on their immediate requirements. Below are the pricing strategies offered by AWS:
| Pricing Strategy | How it works |
|---|---|
| Pay as you go | Suitable for workloads that have volatile peaks or have special scalability needs. You only pay for the computing resources you use, calculated by the hour. |
| Save more when you commit | You get savings of up to 30% to 50% discount when instances are paid in advance for 1-3 years. |
| Pay less by using more | This is a tiered pricing model where the more you use, the less you pay. The data transfer IN is free of charge, and the price reduces following the principle of economies of scale. |
Moreover, your company can drive up to 40% in cost efficiencies simply by moving to the cloud. These savings stem from the removal of on-premise infrastructure, which require hardware, software, and a team to maintain them.
Security
AWS offers exceptional security frameworks, with services such as Identity Access and Management (IAM), in which your admin manages and controls AWS user access. AWS also provides security against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, and filters for harmful traffic against applications. At the time of deployment, Amazon Inspector automatically assesses your setup to identify security threats and deficiencies. Large companies, such as NASDAQ and Dow Jones ,use AWS and these companies cannot compromise on security for obvious reasons – and neither should you.
Multi Region Backups
Amazon’s availability zones allow you to maintain business continuity during most failure modes, including natural disasters. This is why large companies that simply cannot tolerate service outages choose AWS.
User Friendly
AWS has an extremely user-friendly architecture. It comes with a simple AWS management panel that is accessible upon registration for the service. You don’t need a lot of technical knowledge in order to use the server interface. And, you can opt for a variety of apps and services through the console.
Storage
AWS offers high storage capabilities that you can purchase as a standalone service, or use in combination with other AWS services. The high storage Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances can help you with any high input/ output applications such as Hadoop, Data warehousing, etc.
Amazon’s different storages are as follows :
- Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS): This is a block level storage that can be used in combination with Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. EBS can be used to store data that is used regularly.
- Amazon Glacier: This is a low cost storage tier that can be used to store long-term data that are used infrequently. It is an ideal storage option for data backup and archive.
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3): This option helps in providing storage for many use cases, such as data lakes, cloud-native applications, and mobile apps through a web-based interface.
- Amazon Elastic File System: This storage option automatically grows and shrink capacity as you add or remove files. It does not require any management or provisioning.
Databases
Database management is an important feature of AWS. The service – not you – takes on the responsibility of the day-to-day management of these databases on, so that you and your team can focus on other priorities.
| Type of Database | Applications | AWS service |
|---|---|---|
| Document | Content management, catalogs, user profiles | Amazon DocumentDB (With MongoDB compatibility) |
| Key-Value | High-traffic web applications, ecommerce systems | Amazon DynamoDB |
| Wide-Column | High-scale industrial apps for equipment maintenance, fleet management, and route optimization | Amazon Keyspaces |
| Relational | Traditional applications, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), ecommerce | Amazon Redshift, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) |
| Graph | Recommendation Engine, Fraud detection, social networking | Amazon Neptune |
| Ledger | Banking transactions, supply chains | Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) |
| In-Memory | Geospatial applications, Caching | Amazon ElastiCache for Redis, Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached |
| Time Series | Industrial telemetry, IoT, DevOps | Amazon Timestream |
Final Words
AWS has remained the market leader since its inception for a variety of reasons, only a few of which are described above. With its 200+ services and abundance of tools for all your needs, AWS delivers exceptional solutions.
You can reach out to Ziffity to help you get started with your AWS needs. We are a cloud service provider and managed IT service provider based out of the U.S. Our certified AWS experts can help you leverage AWS services that will ensure you stay ahead of the competition.
