Infrastructure as a service or IaaS is a cloud computing service that offers various services on a pay-as-you-go basis. These services may often include needed services like computing resources, storage, and networking resources on demand. It is one of the four types of cloud services: software as a service(SaaS), platform as a service(PaaS), and serverless.
Now that we know what IaaS is, we move on to choosing one of the various platforms available. This can be tricky for some people or organizations due to many factors. Hence, you’ll want to select a service that provides anything and everything at a reasonable price. You can do your research and still won’t reach a decision because everything will sound too good to be true, or some services are missing something while others miss something else. Today, we’ll be reviewing Amazon Web Services and why many people choose it over other big names like Microsoft Azure and Google platform.
Why Amazon Web Services?
Many experts have called Amazon web services the bang for the buck deal. Amazon web services can run various services and support different ranges of OS. As widely used OS is supported and non-standard ones, their usage becomes quite universal. This universal appeal is again strengthened by its easy and intuitive setup. Management and monitoring features are also some things that are just cherry on top. Let’s move on to the pros and cons of AWS.
● Pros
1. Being close to the community is what AWS does the best. Along with having a wide range of products and features, it has an expanding list of add-ons and integrations from third parties, which makes your life a lot easier.
2. As mentioned, you have a ton of choices of the operating system from Windows to Linux OS server and other options. This makes AWS a massive attraction as OS restrictions make IaaS services less flexible.
3. One of the most important things other than the quality of the services and its pricing is the security of your data. It automatically identifies threats by continuously monitoring the network activity and account behavior within your cloud environment.
4. AWS also provides extensive server support.
● Cons
It isn’t a con if you look at it differently. AWS has a vast selection of choices when it comes to services. This makes it very difficult to determine prices.
What do Amazon Web Services offer?
There is a lot to cover if we get into every service and feature it offers. Hence, we’ll only mention the most attractive features and the ones that are industry standards. To showcase how vast AWS is, let us give you an example: In 2016, AWS launched 1012 new features, and in 2017, it launched additional 1430 new features. That amounts to almost 1500 new features in just two years.
You will be getting the essential IaaS platform services, which are cloud services, including compute, storage and content delivery, databases, and networking. But, as you can tell, this is just the beginning. In addition to these essential services, it also offers mobile developer tools, management tools, Internet of Things(IoT), security, and enterprise apps.
Accessing all these tools is made as easy as it can be. You will be able to control all these tools with extensive admin controls. The admin controls will be accessible via a secure web client. You will be able to control and manage everything with tools like identity management, auditing, monitoring and logging, encryption key creation/control/storage, etc.
Setting up with AWS
If you haven’t done your research or are not intuitive enough, you will run into many problems. Just the number of features alone is enough to overwhelm you. Also, setting up was significantly tricky at the starting time of the services. However, they have improved upon the system, and you can see that it is well thought out and clear.
If your requirements aren’t very complicated, you will be able to handle the setup yourself. However, complex needs require a good consultant who could advise you of the exact services and features that you should be going for. This will also allow you to have the accurate pricing of the services you want. Once you have everything set up in the correct order, you click okay and wait while your infrastructure is built. The time will again depend on the complexity of the infrastructure.
Conclusion
If you manage setting up the infrastructure you want, you’ll likely have excellent performance benchmarks with reasonably reasonable pricing. In addition, you will have great flexibility due to the plethora of available options. AWS is the best choice, no matter which field your organization is in.