Amazon Web Services review AWS is a provider of an infrastructure web services platform concentrated in the cloud. (Infrastructure-as-a-service) 1. What factors contribute to the growth in popularity of AWS? AWS is becoming more and more popular with time, because of it has some competitive advantages: * Cost-effectiveness. No up-front payments. No long-term contracts. Customers pay only for actual usage of services with help of their credit card (Pay as you go). * Dependability. AWS provides massive storage space and tested platforms, providing scalable and secure operations. Flexibility. Customers are allowed to build their own applications using amazon’s platforms. * Comprehensive solutions. Amazon can incorporate its services with customer’s previous solutions to provide even more cost-effectiveness. * Reliability. Millions of transactions per minute. A lot of commodity hardware which can pick up in case of some technical failures on the other hardware. (always-on and self-healing infrastructure) * Great amount of apps on the one side and availability to install whatever OS or other soft customer wants on the other side. Network externalities. More customers More apps Economies of scale (spreading fixed hardware costs between higher number of users) Lower prices. * Environmental friendly. Amazon uses cutting age cooling technologies for its datacenters to produce smaller footprint. 2. How does AWS differ from other cloud service providers? For example MS Azure and Google Apps are best described as platform-as-a-service. Customers can develop their own code based on platforms provided by Microsoft or Google. Also customers can use MS or Google respectful solutions.

Customer can easily add a number of instances to run his applications, that lets to scale capacity and control costs. AWS’s model is characterized as an infrastructure-as-a-service. It’s like a virtual machine technology, but also provides lots of additional services, such as automated billing, automated scaling, automated notifications, etc. Customers have the ability to incorporate existing instances to the cloud combining with new instances for pretty much all purposes, such as web servers, MySQL servers, etc.

AWS’s model provides more flexibility and control, but on the other hand requires some specific skills (IT admin & developer as well) and knowledge to get going. But in any case Amazon provides consulting and maintenance services. Customers own code on MS Azure or Google somehow locks them to a particular provider, but with infrastructure-as-a-service model it becomes possible to migrate out or change a provider without serious problems. 3. What is the business model(s) for AWS?

AWS offers a wide ecosystem of different services possible to cover almost all aspects of a given architecture. It provides services from service hosting to data storage, messaging, billing etc. Customers are able to create their Amazon Machine images, including there all services they want and choosing computing capacity. After that they can duplicate it to a numerous other instances and pay on an hour rate per instance. (approximately 3-5$ a day for 1 basic instance).

Amazon also allow clients to reserve instances for 1-3 years with discount. The services help small businesses to encourage innovations by lowering IT entry costs. Businesses become able to serve millions of clients with less costs and with no physical infrastructure, which is always connected with risks and costs of obsolescence. Also AWS can be used as a compliment or supplement to the own infrastructure because it can be configured to be compatible with all other systems. 4. How can traditional service providers complete with AWS?