Why AWS?
AWS, or Amazon Web Services, is a cloud platform offered by Amazon that provides scalable and cost-effective computing solutions. AWS is the world’s leading cloud provider with a 32% global market share. AWS provides a wide range of services to build and scale applications. You can use AWS for anything from hosting a personal website to large-scale enterprise applications. AWS has customers in over 190 countries.
Here are 10 reasons why you should consider AWS as the cloud platform of choice for your business.
Free tier
AWS offers a lot of its products and services as a free tier. There are three different types of free offers available in AWS, depending on the service; free trial, 12 months free, always free. AWS’s free tier is a great offering that allows you to play around with the AWS Console and get familiar with AWS services.
Global infrastructure
As of now, the AWS Cloud spans 84 Availability Zones in 26 regions worldwide. Further, the company has announced plans for 24 more Availability Zones and 8 more AWS Regions in multiple countries across the world. The global presence of AWS allows you to set up your applications in multiple major cities across the globe, providing low latency access to your customer. This should also help you set up multi-region backups.
Services
AWS cloud is growing rapidly not just in the number of regions but also in the number of services and features. AWS is regularly updating its console and services. If you follow their updates closely, AWS releases groundbreaking features almost every month. The AWS cloud currently offers 200+ services, and the number is ever-growing.
Pricing
AWS has pay-per-use pricing for most of its services. So you only pay for which service you use and exactly the time you use it. For example, AWS Lambda that runs for 15 seconds will only be billed for 15 seconds, S3 storage of 1.5GB will only be billed for exactly 1.5GBs, and so on. This means you do not have to make any commitment. You simply pay for the resource you use and how long you use it.
Simplicity
AWS is designed brilliantly to allow developers to get comfortable with the platform quickly. AWS is constantly upgrading its console to improve the UI experience of the developers. They have good descriptions and color-coding of information to help new users understand the console better.
Performance
For the most part, AWS never goes down. You can check for any current or old outages in AWS services in the AWS Health Dashboard. AWS allows you to massively scale your applications to create highly efficient architectures that scale up and down as needed.
Durability
The company boasts features like infinite storage capacity, 99.999999999% of durability of data in AWS S3. This means that you are more likely to get struck by lightning than lose a file in AWS S3. Not just AWS S3, if you use your data and resources carefully, you can create immutable and highly robust, and efficient architectures.
Integration with existing datacenter
AWS knows that not all traditional applications can be migrated to AWS Cloud. This could be because of various reasons such as compliance, traditional codebase, executive decisions, and more.
Due to this, AWS is highly proposing to use Hybrid Cloud where a part of your applications sits on-premise, and some part of it used AWS cloud resources. AWS Storage Gateway is a service that allows you to use the storage capacity and features of AWS S3 without even having to modify traditional code.
Security
AWS is a secure platform. It offers a free IAM (Identity and Access Management) service that allows you to implement fine-grained policies for users in your AWS account. You can use IAM to allow and deny users to perform an action in your AWS account. AWS also offers the AWS Config service that can help you implement compliance controls in your AWS accounts.
Global leader
With the rise in cloud computing AWS is coming out as a clear winner compared to other cloud providers. It has a 32% market share – more than the next two cloud providers combined.