AWS stands for Amazon Web Services based on providing cloud services by Amazon. To understand AWS, it is necessary to understand Cloud Computing. Cloud Computing is about delivery over the internet of IT resources on-demand basis with pay-as-you-go pricing. ‘Pay-as-you-go’ is a system of paying for a service before it is used. In this system a person or organization pays the cost of some services when they occur rather than paying for it before or afterwards.By AWS, Amazon provides you access to the technology services, like computing power, data storage, and databases on when-needed basis instead of buying or owning a physical data center and server.
Numerous companies and organizations these days, uses the cloud for various purposes including data backup, emailing, data recovery, software development data analytics and web applications. Cloud services are popular among companies of almost all kinds like healthcare, finance and even video game developers. Cloud services are gaining popularity among the businesses due to its several benefits. Cloud services are agile as they provide easy access to a wide range of technologies in order to give you scope of faster innovations and enables you to build almost everything you can think of. With the help of this you can manage to compute, store, learn, analyze, create and implement and can freely do experiments much faster than before which helps you develop your business. Cloud services are quite flexible and you need not to get your company over-resourced as you may need such in future, but with cloud computing you can avail the services to the extent you actually need. As your business needs the shift you can easily and instantly increase or shrink the capacity. Moreover, cloud computing is cost efficient as this allows you to pay for IT services only when and as you consume it. With the help of cloud the businesses and activities can be expanded to new locations and regions and the global deployment, with cloud, is just a matter of minutes.
There may be several cloud models which can be classified as Public Cloud, that is more approachable and suitable to small and medium sized businesses running with a tight budget; Private Cloud, which is a bespoke infrastructure accessible to large single businesses as this provides a higher level of security and autonomy to manage storage, networking and compute components; and Hybrid Cloud, that offers more customized IT solutions by combining two models i.e. private and public cloud deployment and is highly flexible and cost effective and provides enhanced security features.
Cloud Computing with AWS
Amazon Web Services is the most widespread cloud computing service that offers around 175 fully equipped services from numerous data centers around the world.Millions of businesses around the globe, including growing startups, large enterprises and leading government agencies, are associated with AWS due to its services on comparatively lower price and agility.
There are certain features of Cloud Services provided by the Amazon Web Services that show how reliable and popular is the network of AWS. AWS is the leading cloud platform and what sets it in lead is its functionality as AWS significantly offers more services and surplus features in comparison with other cloud providers. From infrastructure (including compute, storage and databases) to evolving technologies (like machine learning and artificial intelligence, data analytics etc.), by providing faster, easier and cost effective access to best in class services AWS enables you to move your data and applications to the cloud and innovate with experiments. AWS has the largest and most dynamic community of millions of consumers and thousands of partners around the world. Consumers of AWS are from every industry and of every size, including startups, public sector organizations, large enterprises and corporates. And as partners AWS is associated with cloud computing specialized system integrators and independent software vendors dedicated for working with AWS.
Apart from these, AWS is fully equipped with advanced features ensuring flexibility and security to the maximum level that makes your cloud environment completely secured. AWS provides a comprehensive set of cloud security tools with 230 security; compliance; and administering features along with supporting more than 90 security standards and compliance certifications, and all its data storage services (more than 110) provides ability of encrypting data. In addition to this Amazon Web Services holds a worldwide network of AWS regions which shows that AWS has the most extensive cloud infrastructure in the world. In more than 20 geographic locations around the world, AWS has set up more than 75 availability zones and has announced several other availability zones in countries like India, Japan, Spain and Switzerland. No other cloud provider offers availability with such low latency and highly redundant networking.
AWS helps you optimizing your expenditure while creating new and scalable applications to compliment your requirements and with AWS, you can easily take control of the cost. The wide range of AWS services, maintains the performance and capacity you need along with providing you the flexibility and cost efficiency. AWS believes in and dedicated to build higher saving potential for customers. Here are some ways for cost optimization with AWS:
- Rightsizing EC2 Instances: An EC2 stand for ‘Elastic Compute Cloud’, which is a web service, provides secure and resizable compute capacity in the cloud. The purpose of rightsizing or resizing is to set instance sizes according to their workloads. To control the cost of cloud, rightsizing is the most effective method. It works with the continuous analysis of instance performance and usage needs and patterns, and then turns off idle instances and rightsizing overprovisioned instances or instances matched poorly to the workload. As the resource needs keep changing, rightsizing must be a continuous process for cost optimization. Rightsizing would be easier if it is scheduled for each instance and simplifying resource monitoring and analysis with the help of tools provided by AWS for the purpose.
- Scheduling on/off time: Scheduling ‘on/off’ times gives considerable results, when it applies to non-production instances including those used for developing, staging, testing and Quality Analysis. By applying ‘on’ schedule for working hours and days could save a lot for you and this works more efficiently when the development work held in irregular schedules.
- Choosing Right Pricing Models: This method emphasizes on using Reserved Instances in order to reduce Relational Database Services (RDS), Elasticache and Elasticsearch costs. You are advised to invest in reserved capacity in case of certain services such as Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS. Reserved instances reduce the cost by more than 70% over equivalent to demand capacity. Reserved Instances are available in three variants- All, partial and no up-front payments.
- Use Auto Scaling: Another key advantage of the AWS Cloud Computing is that it offers you aligning resources as per demand.By using Auto Scaling, you can handle variable demand or sudden spikes in a cost-effective manner and can dynamically design the capacity as this gives you access to add or turning off additional resources as and when needed. Auto-Scaling is not just cost-efficient but also helps you identifying which instance is not needed and turning it off automatically by launching a new version of your Application.
- Consolidated Billing: AWS offers you the service of consolidated billing at absolutely no additional cost. Consolidated billing is beneficial for when you have multiple accounts. This service enables you to check a compiled statement of all your AWS charges from all your accounts. In this, one account would be designated as the Master Account and that account only would pay the charges accrued by all the other accounts.You can also track and download account wise cost data. AWS Consolidated Billing helps you managing costs and controlling spends in an easy and effective way.
- Using Appropriate Storage Class: Out of several available Amazon S3 object storage tiers, it is crucial to know why and when to use each of these for cost optimization. Amazon offers classified benefits with each tier of S3 object storage and the cost for each tier is broken down into Number of HTTP PUT requests and HTTP GET requests, Volume of data transferred and actual storage amount. Some of the object storage tiers offered by AWS are Amazon S3 Standards, Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access, Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access and Amazon Glacier.
AWS offers a lot of additional AWS tools including Cost Explorer, Billing Dashboard and Detailed Billing Report that helps you managing and controlling your expenses. Using these tools and service in a right manner would definitely help you take financial benefits of cloud computing with Amazon.
