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AWS is Amazon Web Services. They offer a set of products and services that include (1) “compute, storage, database, analytic’s, application, and deployment services that help organizations move faster, lower IT costs, and scale applications.”
That may be true. It is for me as well. So no need right? Well maybe, but probably not. (2) Amazon’s AWS is 5 billion dollar business. They invest enormous amounts of money in technology.
Even if you’re a large enterprise, you’d be hard pressed to beat their efficiency or their budget. I’m not even talking about the abstraction layers on top of the infrastructure. But just the efficiency in compute. The cooling, the hardware design, and economy of scale. AWS is the dominant provider in the cloud based computing services and data storage, so I will start my exploration with them.
First, you have to understand that AWS is a collection of almost two dozen different products and services. Which do totally different things. Pieces of a puzzle, or building blocks, if you will.
No upfront capital expense to build out your data center. No need to preorder hardware and wait for it to arrive.
Need a Windows server? Then spin up a Windows server. Linux? Yes that’s there too.
Load balancer’s? Yep, with SSL offload. Storage, and databases? Both of those have a few different options.
Signing up for an account is free. You will need to supply a credit card and have a mobile/SMS number. However, most of the services have free tier options, which allow you to use a certain tier of service for free. So test, learn, build stuff. For details visit https://aws.amazon.com/free/
