To the vast majority of people, Amazon is a vast marketplace where you can purchase anything at any time. But Amazon is much more than just the world’s largest eCommerce platform. If you’re a developer or a business, Amazon offers a service so essential you won’t know how you managed without it.
Said service is Amazon Web Services, which provides on-demand cloud computing and APIs to individuals, businesses, and even governments. What AWS provides is a pay-as-you-go platform that provides the basic abstract technical infrastructure and distributed computing so your business can develop and deploy websites, web applications, containers, cloud solutions, clusters, or any combination of nearly any type of technology you can dream up.
With AWS, the sky’s the limit for developers and businesses. And because it’s pay-as-you-go, you’ll find it to be a cost-effective solution with a rate that only increases as you scale up. In other words, if you don’t use it, you don’t pay for it.
The Birth of AWS
AWS came into being in the early 2000s when Amazon was building an eCommerce-as-a-Service platform called Merchant.com. This platform was intended for third-party retailers such that they could build their own eCommerce solutions.
While building Merchant.com, Amazon was also in the early stages of creating a shared IT platform that could focus on customer-facing innovation. Both of these solutions relied heavily on Linux and open-source solutions and would eventually help Amazon to open Web Services to all developers.
It didn’t take long for AWS to catch on, and soon hundreds of unique applications had been deployed via the platform. After a quick rise in popularity, Amazon launched Amazon S3 cloud storage, which was immediately followed by EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). EC2 is part of Amazon’s cloud-computing platform that allows users to rent virtual computers to run their applications. EC2’s first enterprise customer was Microsoft.
According to Statista, AWS’s quarterly revenue is 13.5bn and enjoys a 32% year-on-year segment growth. That’s a considerable increase that’s showing zero signs of slowing down. And of all the cloud hosting providers, AWS has 32% of the market share. Their closest competitor is Azure at 19%.
What Can You Do on AWS?
Imagine this: Your business needs a data center, but you don’t have either the space or the budget to purchase and deploy rack after rack of physical servers. What do you do? You co-locate your data center with a company like AWS. Once you’ve created an account, you deploy virtual servers that you can then begin developing and rolling out websites, applications, containers, and hosted cloud solutions. In fact, if you can deploy it within an on-premise data center, you can do so on AWS.
Even better, your IT staff doesn’t have to worry about maintaining physical servers. So not only are you saving money on hardware, those cloud instances can be easily backed up, cloned, rolled back, re-located, brought up, and taken down. All of this is managed from a user-friendly dashboard. And because AWS is backed by one of the largest and most profitable companies on the planet, you can be sure the services will continue and remain reliable.
Who Uses AWS?
If you need proof of how popular and trustworthy AWS is, consider this shortlist of companies that use the service:
- Adobe
- Airbnb
- AOL
- Autodesk
- Bitdefender
- BMW
- Canon
- Disney
- Dow Jones
- ESPN
- Financial Times
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more impressive list of users for any business on the planet. Even Apple spends more than $30 million a month on AWS. So not only does AWS have plenty of enterprise developer cred built up, they have the income to keep them on top of their game.
What Are the Benefits of Using AWS?
The benefits of using AWS are many. Here are just a few:
- Easy to use: AWS is designed for simple and fast deployment of hosted applications. With the AWS Management Console for full access to all of the AWS application hosting services and features. The AWS Management Console is the best in the business.
- A vast array of available tools: AWS offers over 70 different services that your business can take advantage of. This is truly a one-stop-shop for all of your cloud computing and IT infrastructure needs.
- Unlimited storage capacity: Unlike those on-premise servers, AWS offers unlimited storage capacity that grows as you need. On top of storage space, you’ll find more than enough bandwidth to handle the continued growth of your company.
- Security: AWS is incredibly secure. You’ll benefit from enterprise encryption and security at a fraction of the cost of an on-premise solution. Both encryption and security protocols are built into the AWS infrastructure by default.
- Flexibility and affordability: Because AWS is pay-as-you-go, your business will enjoy hosting costs that only increase as your usage increases. This is infrastructure on demand at its best. On top of that, you get to select which operating system, web application platform, programming languages, and frameworks you use.
Conclusion
If your company is looking for a cloud-based hosting provider, look no further than AWS. With this service, there’s no limit to what your in-house developers can do. If the only thing stopping your company from reaching its truest potential is the righting service provider, AWS has you covered.
