Explaining the Concept of AWS and Revealing Its Benefits for Business

Cloud services and cloud computing are gaining momentum. Today, many entrepreneurs from various niches turn towards cloud services because of the cost-effectiveness and scalability they provide. Amazon is the most famous provider of various cloud services. But what advantages does AWS bring to your business and what processes can be improved with the help of it?

What is AWS?

AWS stands for Amazon Web Services. The concept of AWS is Infrastructure as a Services (IaaS). It contains a large number of services that have different purposes. Some services deal with analytics and databases, while others take care of the secureness of the software.

Amazon Web Services mitigates the risks of data leaks and keeps data integrity due to platform security measures. AWS includes a ton of different services, but we’re going to single out the most popular among them.

AWS Elastic Compute Cloud

AWS Elastic Compute Cloud is an IaaS computing service. Before deploying your app on Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), you have to build a suitable server infrastructure that allows you to run the project. Put it simply, you have to bring up and adjust virtual servers to launch the app. On top of that, you should choose a suitable operating system and add database instances. In the majority of web development companies, DevOps engineers are responsible for the adjustment of EC2 infrastructure.

EC2 shows us another benefit of AWS. It can create infrastructure before the app deployment. Besides, EC2 allows you to balance the data load and skip manual adjustment with auto-scaling. It also offers turn-key templates with prem`de configuration.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Elastic Beanstalk allows developers to deploy applications in AWS Cloud with the help of various commands. Commands can be run in Management Console provided by AWS. When deployed, Elastic Beanstalk can manage server infrastructure without human interference.

This service brings even more benefits like the improved level of control over the system, useful insights, statistics, and access to in-depth processes of your app.

Use Cases of AWS in Business

Amazon Web Services, with its arsenal of tools, allows to improve the efficiency of internal processes in the company, boost employees’ productivity, and get powerful statistics about the company. Now, we’ll get a closer look at some use cases of AWS in top-tier companies.

McDonald’s

McDonald’s is one of the biggest fast-food chains all over the world. When the company serves more than 60 million clients a day, it’s worth thinking about the delivery service. And that’s where AWS helped McDonald’s out. By using Amazon Web Services, a fast-food chain managed to establish a delivery network in 4 months. As for now, this cloud-based delivery platform processes around 20000 orders per second. It has great integration potential with other food delivery platforms.

WeWork

WeWork is an excellent example of the company that switched from one AWS service to another. Initially, the company had a project management tool called FieldLens. At first, this system was based on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and had a great performance for more than 2 years. But, the main problem of the majority of software projects is scalability. WeWork needed to expand the capacity of its software and searched for alternatives.

Docker and AWS Elastic Container became a rescuing hand for WeWork. With these tools, FieldLens is capable of hosting 80,000 users and 110,000 projects.

Repp Health

Speed of service is one of the main factors that influence the quality of service in healthcare establishments. Patients don’t want to spend their time standing in lines, so healthcare providers have to find some kind of solutions. However, the task is complicated by a lot of visitors and the time that physicians need to adjust the equipment before the visit of each patient.

Repp Health came up with a cloud-based tracking solution. AWS provides tools and a platform for storing and analyzing data gathered by IoT devices. Thus, doctors can monitor the patient’s health condition remotely. Moreover, the software updates patients’ EHRs with the latest data automatically, so physicians don’t have to waste time on routine tasks.

Benefits of AWS for Businesses

As you can see, a lot of companies create their software based on AWS. But what exact advantages does this infrastructure bring to entrepreneurs, and how do they benefit from it? Let’s figure everything out.

AWS Prices

With AWS, you’re not obliged to pay for all the services that you don’t use. Just pick what you need and go with it. Besides, it charges you on a per-minute basis, so you can stop paying whenever you need to. In plain language, if you used a server for 2 hours, you’ll pay for these two hours and not a minute more.

Scalability

The on-premise model is poor in terms of scalability. To expand your storage, you have to buy or rent new hardware, adjust the network, and find more space for your server room. However, cloud structure offers you an unlimited amount of storage that will satisfy your needs in terms of performance. Even though a cloud model makes you pay on a constant basis, it’s still more profitable than expanding your own server every time. Moreover, rapid scaling is beneficial for entrepreneurs who want to build a SaaS app. These apps depend on server resources, so AWS is highly recommended for this niche.

Security

AWS brings cloud security on a brand new level. It ensures both physical and network protection of your infrastructure. Firewalls, top-notch anti-malware software, absence of vulnerabilities makes AWS networks the most secure cloud service around the globe. Physical means of security like cameras, personnel authorization, biometric sensors, and others ensure the data safety from within.

Wrapping Up

To sum up, Amazon Cloud Services is a next-generation infrastructure that simplifies architecture issues, helps to scale the storage, analyzes data, and multiplies revenues of different companies. With AWS, you don’t have to worry about the data safety, performance of an on-premise server, or scalability. However, to deploy the project with the help of AWS, you’ll probably need a professional team of developers.

This guide was developed in cooperation with Vitaly Kuprenko, a technical writer at Cleveroad – a web and mobile app development company in Ukraine.