With the revenue of $3.2 billion, Amazon web services (AWS) is ruling the world of cloud services leaving the competitors much behind. And this year, it’s expected to reach to $13 billion with a remarkable 55% rise in the profit. Amazed by the numbers, right? I am monitoring AWS’ growth continuously from the past two years and I can surely say that Amazon’s cloud computing arm is a winning horse in the running race of cloud services.
Why is Amazon cloud Services running quite ahead in the race? The answer is one line - AWS leverages ‘as a service’ concept at its best. AWS has come a long way. In its initial days, Small developers used to take maximum advantages of AWS and that too for running a simple website. Now, the giant business names, such as Netflix, Airbnb, Comcast, Capital One, and Slack has been on the clientele list of AWS. This shows a lot about the effectiveness of AWS.
What made Amazon Web Services a top-notch choice in the arena of cloud computing?
Well, the answer lies within the statement of Forrester Research Principal Analyst Dave Bartoletti, "The early rise of Amazon was born of developers building cool new apps." Amazon has clustered IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) into four major categories that define the structure of cloud – Compute, Storage, Database & Networking, and Content Delivery. To strengthen the security services, AWS has leveraged the amazingly robust modules such as AWS identity management, AWS certificate manager, and Amazon hosted active directory on the software level. At the hardware level, AWS CloudHSM takes care of storage and management quite a well. Not only that, to monitor the infrastructure usage, Amazon has leveraged the tools such as Amazon cloud watch, AWS Cloudtrail, and AWS config.
The five key factors which make the AWS different in competition:
AWS virtuous cycle
The founder and CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos said that a virtuous cycle begins with a happy customer, and then happy customers will bring more and more customers. The power of words of mouth is substantial. The more customers opt for the cloud, more servers get set up and as more servers are set up, more customers can be leveraged. With gradually growing, Amazon lowered the rates of infrastructure services.
Credit: the-amazon-way
With customer devices and cloud computing infrastructure devices, Amazon flywheel shows the path towards business growth and monetization effect at the same time.
Highest level of computing capacity
A report written by Gartner VP Lydia Leong reveals that AWS comprises of 10 times more computing capacity of 14 biggest infrastructure vendors pooled together. This is a really big figure as it shows the power of Amazon over other competitors. Microsoft, Google, VMware, Rackspace, IBM together also can’t beat the computing capacity of AWS. Government clouds such as ITAR, DISA, HIPAA, CJIS etc. are the best example of the trust AWS has built on Americans.
Vast Scalability
Ecommerce has now grown like anything. To strive in the arena of e-commerce, one needs to provide speed, performance, and convenience to customers. The convenience comes with effective application design and development, but performance and speed rely totally on the handling of infrastructure! The kind of elasticity Amazon cloud services leverages is unmatched. As the needs of business growth, the infrastructure can also grow without even a change in the physical setup. As per customer demand, resources can be quickly added or removed and the costing takes place in accordance with consumption. Costing – we will have a look at next segment.
The unbeatable pricing model – Pay Per Use
The sea full of fishes is provided to you, but you have to pay per fish consumed only! Got it? Whether it’s a matter of large storage space, new server, upscale/downscale of the server, CDN integration – everything is available to you. As your need grows, you can avail the infrastructure or service with a broader means, but you will pay as per use only. No hidden cost, no cost of extra hardware or service setup, nothing! The billing of availing Amazon Web Services happens via pay as you go model only.
Agility
Amazon has some amazing APIs that competitors lack. This includes Hosted Database (RD), NoSQL, SES, Dynamo DB etc. which are exclusively offered by Amazon cloud services only. AWS offers the APIs which developers can seamlessly implement in the project. Everything from taking a backup, launching an application, application optimization can happen through APIs only.
At last,
Amazon beats up the competition with everything at its best, right from the scalability, elasticity, security, openness, procurement, and agility. All these things come in its best environment with very flexible pricing model – pay as you go. As your business scales up, the resources scale up automatically.
