AWS Cloud Value Proposition
— Why adopt cloud technology
This blog answers the most frequent question I get from people who don’t work with or want to transition to cloud technologies.
“Why Cloud?”
My reply is pretty consistent: better security, lower costs, higher flexibility in resource management and no infrastructure maintenance overhead. Grouping all of these and more give you the AWS Cloud Value Proposition.
On a high level, the Cloud Value Proposition is:
“Safe, secure access to highly available, reliable, and durable IT resources such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis with pay-as-you-go pricing.”
The AWS Cloud Value Proposition has five principles. Keep in mind that these are different from the Well-Architectured Framework.
- Security
AWS offers multiple Security and Compliance services for various applications. Apart from the Shared Responsibility Model, there are options for configuring extra security measures.
Some security measures include Identity and Access Management, Key Management Service, AWS GuardDuty and AWS Shield. Compliance features include PCI-DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, GDPR, and more.
- Agility
Applications can be developed and deployed globally across multiple geolocations within minutes. The speed of experimentation, development and deployment is exponentially higher compared to applications developed on-premises.
AWS Global Infrastructure offers a highly robust and reliable cloud platform to develop and deploy applications in Regions, Availability Zones, and Edge Locations.
- Flexibility
AWS offers multiple services for various applications. There are over 200 products that support services to run all kinds of workloads.
AWS offers development services for applications ranging from website hosting, microservices to AI-ML and Big Data. AWS Developer Tools dispense services for Continuous Integrity / Continuous Delivery(CI/CD), Monitoring and Logging and Infrastructure as Code modelling.
- Elasticity
Applications can scale the resources required for smooth operability based on the demand — the application capacity is sufficient to deal with the incoming requests while paying for only what they use.
Auto Scaling provisions resources as and when the incoming demand fluctuates over a threshold. For example, provision a new instance to balance the load if its CPU utilization crosses 70%. When the CPU utilization falls below 40%, the new instance is terminated.
- Cost
AWS makes it easy to scale up and down based on demand and removes the need for an on-premise data centre to reduce costs. By using the pay as you go model, costs incurred can be monitored and reduced.
Cost Optimization tools help in tracking resources spread across the different services launched in various Regions and AZs. Monitoring, logging and forecasting costs help in reducing the cost incurred while serving applications to the end-users.
Conclusion
I hope that this shed some light on why I prefer cloud technology over local application development. Feel free to go through my AWS Sketchnotes series — AWS from A to Z.
Thank you for reading.
