What’s the biggest benefit in to cloud?
Cost savings, you might say. But there’s more.
Much more.
Benefits of digital transformation
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Cost Savings
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Reliability
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Mobility
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Withstand interruptions
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Benefits of digital transformation . Cost Savings . Reliability . Mobility . Withstand interruptions .
There are many potential advantages to adopting cloud-based solutions for your business.
Migrating to the cloud can help with the following:
Deliver your content across the entire globe’s infrastructure 🗺
Are you serving customers worldwide?
Making use of AWS’s global infrastructure has the following advantages: low network latencies between your customers and your infrastructure, being able to comply with regional data protection requirements, and benefiting from different infrastructure prices in different regions.
AWS has redundant network connections across the internet.
The AWS Cloud spans 87 Availability Zones within 27 geographic regions around the world, with announced plans for 24 more Availability Zones and 8 more AWS Regions in Australia, Canada, India, Israel, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, and Thailand.
Flexible capacity (scalability)
Flexible capacity frees you from planning. You can scale from one virtual machine to thousands of virtual machines. Your storage can grow from gigabytes to petabytes. You no longer need to predict your future capacity needs for the coming months and years.
Example shopping traffic patterns (system load %)
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If you run a web shop, you have seasonal traffic patterns, as shown in the example.
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Think about day versus night, and weekday versus weekend or holiday. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could add capacity when traffic grows and remove capacity when traffic shrinks? That’s exactly what flexible capacity is about. You can start new virtual machines within minutes and throw them away a few hours after that.
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The cloud has almost no capacity constraints. You no longer worry about rack space, switches, and power supplies—you can add as many virtual machines as you like. If your data volume grows, you can always add new storage capacity. Flexible capacity also means you can shut down unused systems.
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Public sector employees in the United Arab Emirates have changed their work week, effective in 2022 to meet international markets (Monday-Friday).
A colleague of mine had to change his server environment to reflect the new traffic patterns.
What would’ve traditionally taken months to do, was possible in minutes on cloud.
Driving digital growth:
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Most AWS services are highly available or fault tolerant by default. If you use those services, you get reliability for free. AWS supports you as you build systems in a reliable way. It provides everything you need to create your own highly available or fault- tolerant systems.
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In AWS, you request a new virtual machine, and a few minutes later that virtual machine is booted and ready to use. The same is true with any other AWS service avail- able. You can use them all on demand. Your development process will be faster because of the shorter feedback loops. You can eliminate constraints such as the number of test environments available; if you need another test environment, you can create it for a few hours.
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AWS is increasing its global infrastructure constantly. Thus AWS benefits from an economy of scale. As a customer, you will benefit partially from these effects. AWS reduces prices for their cloud services every now and then.
A few examples:
Last year, charges for storing data on the object storage S3 were reduced by 16% to 28%.Prices were reduced by 10% to 17% for virtual machines with a one- or three-year commitment (reserved instances).
AWS reduced prices for virtual machines running a Microsoft SQL Server (Standard Edition) by up to 52%.
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When you use AWS services, you can be sure that their quality and security follow the latest standards and certifications. For example:
ISO 27001 —A worldwide information security standard certified by an independent and accredited certification body.
ISO 9001 —A standardized quality management approach used worldwide and certified by an independent and accredited certification body.
PCI DSS Level 1 —A data security standard (DSS) for the payment card industry (PCI) to protect cardholders data
Monitor your expenditure
How much does it cost?
A bill from AWS is similar to an electric bill. Services are billed based on use. You pay for the time a virtual machine was running, the used storage from the object store, or the number of running load balancers. Services are invoiced on a monthly basis. The pricing for each service is publicly available; if you want to calculate the monthly cost of a planned setup, you can use the AWS Simple Monthly Calculator
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Virtual machines are billed per minute. Load balancers are per hour.
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Traffic is measured in gigabytes or in number of requests
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Usage can be measured by capacity. For example, 50GB reserved volume no matter how much you use. Or real usage, such as 2.3GB
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The AWS pay-per-use pricing model creates new opportunities. For example, the barrier for starting a new project is lowered, as you no longer need to invest in infrastructure up front
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You can start virtual machines on demand and only pay per second of usage, and you can stop using those virtual machines whenever you like and no longer have to pay for them. You don’t need to make an upfront commitment regarding how much storage you’ll use.
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Big servers cost exactly as much as two smaller ones with the same capacity.
So, how about dividing your systems into smaller parts, given that the cost will equally weigh out.
This makes fault tolerance affordable not only for big companies but also for smaller budgets.
Case-study: Going into business
Let’s imagine that the Marcoverse develops into an e-commerce site to sell products - and with the amount of spare USB cables I have lying around, I just might have to!
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Say it start successfully in January, and I ran at marketing campaign to increase sales through the next month. Success! I was able to increase the number of visitors to the Marcoverse x5 in February!
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AWS is paid based on usage. The embedded table shows the monthly bill for February.
The number of visitors increased from 100,000 to 500,000
The bill increasing from £127 to £495 (a whopping 390% increase).
[data sampled from TCO calculator]
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Because the site would handle more traffic, I’d in turn pay for more services such as the CDN, web server and database.
Other services, like the amount of storage needed for static files didn’t change. So the price remained the same.
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Most AWS services are highly available or fault tolerant by default. If you use those services, you get reliability for free. AWS supports you as you build systems in a reliable way. It provides everything you need to create your own highly available or fault- tolerant systems.
-
In AWS, you request a new virtual machine, and a few minutes later that virtual machine is booted and ready to use. The same is true with any other AWS service available. You can use them all on demand. Your development process will be faster because of the shorter feedback loops. You can eliminate constraints such as the number of test environments available; if you need another test environment, you can create it for a few hours.
-
AWS is increasing its global infrastructure constantly. Thus AWS benefits from an economy of scale. As a customer, you will benefit partially from these effects. AWS reduces prices for their cloud services every now and then.
A few examples:
Last year, charges for storing data on the object storage S3 were reduced by 16% to 28%.Prices were reduced by 10% to 17% for virtual machines with a one- or three-year commitment (reserved instances).
AWS reduced prices for virtual machines running a Microsoft SQL Server (Standard Edition) by up to 52%.
-
When you use AWS services, you can be sure that their quality and security follow the latest standards and certifications. For example:
ISO 27001 —A worldwide information security standard certified by an independent and accredited certification body.
ISO 9001 —A standardized quality management approach used worldwide and certified by an independent and accredited certification body.
PCI DSS Level 1 —A data security standard (DSS) for the payment card industry (PCI) to protect cardholders data
Considerations
