People ask for reasons why they should have to choose AWS for their infrastructure needs. Many customers are using AWS in more than 190 countries, with hundreds of case-studies including companies like Dow Jones, SAP, Netflix, Pinterest, Coursera, NASA/JPL, Vodafone, 99Designs, Reddit, Thomson Reuters, Flipboard, Expedia & LinkedIn.

But, several companies are managing their infrastructure in a co-located data center, or in-house may still have issues regarding cost, security, data privacy, and many more.

In this blog, I had listed what I see as a significant advantage of using AWS for infrastructure needs:

1. Zero CapEx:

Several companies tend to believe that AWS or any other cloud-based solution is only for the riches. However, the reality is the opposite. Start-ups hesitating from using Oracle as their database or any other commercials Softwares which demand high-upfront licensing cost must explore AWS Marketplace. There are high chances that they can find those products on an hourly priced model with no extra charge.

2. No-Commitment:

whenever you require a server for hosting a small website, a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for large traffic sites, reliable & scalable email service, data warehousing service, or Hadoop cluster for your BigData needs.

AWS offers everything with absolutely no commitment at all. Charges for All server-backed services are on an hourly basis, and as you stop/terminate a server, you won't get billed from the next hour.

3. Get Rid of Negotiations:

Surely price negotiations are not a knowledgable area for many and nor we like spending our energy & time doing that even if we can. AWS significantly focuses on to cost of reducing infrastructure for its customers. They have reduced their prices across various services more than 30 times in the last few times. Tools like Trusted Advisor and 3rd-party tools like Cloudability, CloudCheckr, Cloudyn, etc. can provide you insights to optimize cost within your existing set-up on AWS.

4. Acquirement:

When acquiring a new server might take from several hours to 8-10 days depending upon even if your infrastructure is on-premise, co-located or if you are linked with a hosting provider. The same time is required to procure software licenses, as well. AWS allows you to get new servers within a few minutes with no need to buy separate licenses for many operating systems & software.

5. Pay as you Use:

Think of limitless spaces for archival needs & your backup, ability to launch new servers, up-scale/downscale a server, transcoding media files, CDN integration, unlimited bandwidth, and a lot more highly scalable features/services accessible to you while you pay based on your actual usage only.

6. Security:

AWS has built world-class, highly secure infrastructure, both over the internet and physically . some highlights from the security measures mentioned on the AWS website are:

Data centers are employed 24×7 by prepared security guards, and access is authorized strictly on a less honored basis several geographic regions and Availability Zones allow to remain resilient in the face of most failure modes, including system failures or natural disasters. Capability to configure built-in firewall rules from totally public to private or somewhere in between to control access to instances.

Different users do Access Management (IAM) & Leverage Identity & CloudTrail to keep track of all exercises.

More other highlights include Multi-factor authentication (MFA), private subnets, encrypted data storage, and Isolate GovCloud.

7. Flexibility:

Forget about assumed work or scientific analysis to identify your infrastructure needs. You can use auto-scaling to build a self-managing infrastructure coordinated carefully to the specific requirement based on resources/traffic utilization. Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) allows to spin-up clones in multiple regions for different environments within minutes.

8. Global Leader:

Amazon has a global presence with ten provinces, 36 availability zones, and more than 50 edge locations. A month back, Gartner located AWS in Leaders Quadrant of the new Magic Quadrant for Cloud Service provider. Gartner also mentioned that AWS has an extra five times the compute capacity in use than the overall total of rest 14 Cloud service providers placed in the existing Magic Quadrant.

9. Best PaaS Offerings:

AWS has highly expandable managed services for database, transcoding, storage, caching, data-warehousing, infrastructure management, application management&backup. This reduces the overall effort & time spent in managing & setting-up the infrastructure and thereby significantly minimizes the go-to-market cycle for end-users.

10. API:

APIs are accessible in various programming languages to help you achieve your aim programmatically. Even if it means launching a new instance or taking backups, everything is possible through API. APIs are robust than AWS Management Console.