Many factors are involved if your company is considering migrating workloads to the cloud. The same is true if your business is searching for a new CSP that can better address its unique requirements. It’s an important decision that will influence how your company operates and competes for years.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the largest public cloud service provider (CSP) in the world with 33% of the global market in 2022. Its dominant position in the market makes it an attractive choice when looking for cloud services. This overview should give you the information you need to determine if AWS is right for your business.
How AWS Got Started
AWS is a subsidiary of Amazon Corporation. The idea was conceived at a meeting of company executives in 2003. They identified Amazon’s infrastructure services as one of the major differentiating factors between them and their competition. The consensus was that there was a market for a combination of infrastructure services and developer tools to create extensible and flexible computing environments.
AWS was launched on March 19, 2006, with Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The company expanded its scope to Europe in 2009 and added Amazon CloudFront, a powerful content delivery network (CDN). In the ensuing years, AWS has become the leading CSP due to its innovative and wide variety of offerings.
AWS Pricing
Pricing is often the main priority of businesses migrating to the cloud. One of the selling points of cloud computing is that it can reduce costs when compared to traditional, on-premises data centers. AWS offers multiple and flexible pricing plans that address the needs of your business. Following are some highlights of the AWS pricing plans.
- Pay-as-you-go pricing lets companies pay only for the services they need without long-term contacts or complex licensing. Businesses use services in the same way they pay for utilities, paying for the amount consumed without termination fees when they are no longer needed.
- Savings plans offer flexible pricing models that can provide customers with substantial savings. These plans are applicable for AWS Compute and AWS Machine Learning services. Businesses that commit to using a specific amount of an AWS service for a 1 or 3-year term are eligible for these savings.
- Volume discounts are available for services such as S3 with tiered pricing. The more a company uses, the lower the cost per GB. Companies can lower prices based on how frequently they access data by choosing the right compilation of AWS services.
- AWS offers a free tier that allows customers to gain free, hands-on experience with its products and services. Some of the free offerings are for a limited time or provide for a limited amount of usage. Others don’t expire and are free to all AWS customers.
AWS provides a pricing calculator to help companies estimate the cost of a proposed cloud architecture.
Major AWS Offerings
An extensive portfolio of services is available from AWS. Let’s look at some of the major categories of products and services your company can obtain from AWS.
Storage
Storage was one of the initial services offered by AWS and has continued to be one of its flagship offerings. Multiple storage options are available including:
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) provides object storage with industry-leading scalability, availability, and security. S3 lets you store and access any amount of data from anywhere in the world.
- Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) is a serverless solution that enables file sharing without the complexity of managing storage.
- Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) offers high-performance block storage for transaction-intensive workloads.
- AWS DataSync is a data transfer service that facilitates data movement between on-premises and AWS storage.
- AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery lets companies minimize downtime and data loss by providing fast and reliable recovery of cloud and on-premises applications.
Compute
AWS offers compute options that address the needs of any business. Examples of computer services include:
- Virtual machine instances enable companies to launch applications without upfront hardware costs. Customers can automatically add or reduce compute capacity to address fluctuating demands.
- Multiple services that focus on running containers efficiently are available through AWS. Customers can manage their infrastructure or opt for a fully-managed Kubernetes service.
- AWS Lambda is a serverless solution that lets customers run code without thinking about the underlying servers and only pay for the computing time they consume.
Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
AWS is the leading CSP when it comes to machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) services. The tools available from AWS enable companies to gain deep insights into their data resources to compete more effectively in the modern marketplace. The challenges of processing big data require these types of solutions. AWS ML and AI services help companies:
- Use AI to solve common business problems;
- Add AI functionality to business applications;
- Build, train, and deploy ML models to address any use case;
- Obtain ML predictions without writing any code.
We have only scratched the surface regarding the extent of services offered by AWS. As an industry leader, the company continues to innovate and provide new ways for customers to take advantage of cloud resources. An example is AWS Verified Access, a new method of establishing secure access to enterprise applications without a VPN.
VAST Knows AWS
VAST IT Services partners with AWS and brings a wealth of knowledge specific to the CSP and its wide array of offerings. They can help your business address the challenges of selecting the right products to promote its objectives. After the services have been chosen, VAST can be instrumental in assisting your company successfully migrate to AWS or incorporate them into your existing infrastructure.
AWS Managed Services from VAST brings expertise to your team to ensure best practices are followed and all business requirements are supported. Talk to VAST today and see how they can help you optimize the products and services available from AWS. Whether you are planning a migration or already have a presence on AWS, VAST will help you get the maximum value from your cloud spending.
