Recognizing this, AndPlus has been leveraging the cloud for our clients for several years. On Amazon Web Services (AWS) alone, we have deployed over 200 solutions, with no signs of slowing. In fact, as AWS continues to add features and services, there’s good reason to believe that there will only be more deployments for our clients in the future.
AWS gets a good deal of press, but to the average person, many business leaders, and even some IT people, it’s not all that clear what it is or how to take advantage of it. Part of the problem is that the service offerings are so numerous. So, by way of providing some clarity, here’s a breakdown.
At its most basic, AWS is a global network of data centers populated with high-performance server hardware. With this hardware and high-speed network connections, AWS is able to offer a large array of services:
AWS also offers numerous specialized services, such as cloud migration assistance, content delivery networks, game development environments, streaming services, security services, and more.
From an application development and deployment perspective, there are numerous benefits to AWS:
Perhaps the best part: Subscribers pay only for the resources they use. Thus both the up-front and ongoing costs are quite low compared to setting up similar capabilities in your own data center.
AWS is able to keep its pricing competitive because it automates much of the administration of its services. Creating, configuring, updating, and (if necessary) destroying server instances are all completely automated, along with such functions as resource scaling and installation of software from its Marketplace service.
The disadvantages of AWS are few. There have been occasional outages affecting one or more AWS services, some of which have affected major websites. However, the risk of such an outage is vanishingly small compared to the risk of an outage at your own data center.
Overall, the risks are low and the benefits are compelling, and that’s why more of our clients are interested in seeing what the cloud can do for them. We will be happy to explore cloud solutions for your business problems, too. Whether you’re a two-person startup or a major corporation, we can build a cloud-based solution that’s right for you.