Up until 2010, what we have come to know as the «Cloud» was not the standardized practice that we know of today. An enterprise wanting to keep their data digital and safe had to invest up to US$800 million to implement these types of infrastructures (servers, virtual machines, and other hardware/software). This is what Amazon Web Service, or AWS, does best; it is a term known as IaaS, or Infrastructure as a Service, and it can help reduce these overgrown budgets down to US$2 million by providing it to businesses whose main concern is not maintaining a Cloud. Today, the National Institute of Standards or NIST has set rules and best practices to keep a safe infrastructure across the USA and probably the world.
Some of the characteristics of AWS include:
- On-demand self-service – Procuring a virtual private cloud takes seconds.
- Broad network access – HTTPS endpoints and cloud service access from almost anywhere across the globe (using the Internet).
- Resource pooling – As a necessary standard for all public cloud providers, resources are accurately distributed around the numerous Availability Zones (AZ).
- Rapid elasticity – The bigger an application grows, the more power and services it may need, something which AWS is perfectly capable of providing with EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing).
- Measured Services – You are only charged for what you use, and it is all present and accounted for by the bit and by the second.
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