Getting Started with AWS: The value of cloud

AWS Cloud is the most popular for good reason. But popular doesn't mean easy. Learn about the how to get started on the right path with AWS in this blog series.

• The cloud is an on-demand, elastic IT infrastructure that enables companies to lower costs and innovate faster.
• With over 200 services, Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a service for almost everything a company needs.
• You can achieve a better security posture with AWS than your on premises IT environment ever can.

With 32% global market share, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the most popular cloud platform for business. And for good reason – with global data centers, high availability and security built in at every point, AWS has given companies a more affordable way to experiment and innovate.

One of the things I appreciate most about AWS Cloud is the extra resilience and abilities for your IT infrastructure. It’s always good to be thinking: What’s Plan B? What if our site goes down? What happens to our business continuity?

And AWS has the services to answer these questions and much more. So, let’s make sure you can get started on the right path with AWS in 2022.

Cloud Basics: What is cloud?

First, let’s start with some basics.

When I first start teaching an AWS course, I always ask my students: What is the cloud? When you ask a group of technical people for their opinions on a topic like Cloud, you’re going to have a lot of different answers because everybody has their individual frame of reference. Everybody has their own perspective. Eventually, after the answers pour in, we notice a few topic clusters around Cloud, including AWS, security and pay-as-you-go consumption models. Let’s dive into these topics below.

What is the Cloud? (TL;DR: It’s someone else’s computer.)

If cloud is basically someone else’s computer, this should immediately trigger questions a

What makes AWS so good

There are some key things I think AWS does better than other cloud providers that are big benefits to your business. If you like to dive deeper into specific customer success stories check out AWS customer case studies.

Cloud security

Security is our most important concern when moving to and choosing a cloud platform. It may sound counter-intuitive, but the AWS cloud is super secure. Despite the fact you’re running on somebody else’s computer, you’ll be able to achieve a better security posture than you ever could with your on premises IT environment. This is because security is at the top of the list for AWS. It offers the largest number of overall features; in fact, it outranks other features specific to performance and high availability.

If you work for a large enterprise, take the number of dedicated security personnel in your organization. Now, add two zeros to it and that’s the number of dedicated security folks that AWS employs.

This rule of thumb applies to all cloud hosting providers, too. In fact, the largest cloud hosting providers all have enormous security teams because it’s their number one priority to protect the security of their ecosystem so that customer data and workloads are always protected against threats.

Higher resilience

Resilience in IT refers to the ability to maintain service when there is a disruption to business systems, applications and networks.

If you can easily improve the recoverability and resilience for your workloads in the cloud given the rich set of capabilities available to you in the cloud. Think about struggle for hardware refresh of your hardware vs on AWS. The hoops you must jump through change requests and getting the hardware shipped etc. All of that disappears when you switch to Cloud.

In fact, AWS has their Well-Architected Framework which provide guidelines on how to build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for a variety of your application and workloads in the cloud. Increased agility In my opinion, this is number reason for using AWS. In AWS, your team doesn’t need to learn every single component. Rather, they need to know what to use and when. Just as an auto mechanic doesn’t rebuild an entire car when it won’t start because it only needs a new starter, or IT teams can mirror their entire production environment by spinning up resources in the AWS Cloud in minutes for just quality assurance (QA) testing and even shut them down once testing is complete. This kind of increased agility gives IT teams the ability to experiment and fail quickly!

Lower Costs – kind of

The reason most cloud migrations kick off is to lower costs. I say AWS ‘kind of’ lowers costs because you don’t have hire someone to bring a crash cart into a data center when a server dies. In fact, you don’t have to do any disaster recovery in the data center once you go to the cloud. In the end, you ultimately save a lot of time – that is really where the lower cost discussion comes in. Operating in AWS saves you time and we all know time is money, so yeah – lower costs.

But let’s table the headcount debate. You’re not going to get rid of headcount overnight. What happens is jobs will change and your IT team can perform higher order tasks instead on doing software updates. Your teams will need to get trained up to work on automation and figure out how to mitigate problems before they happen with preventive maintenance.

This is the cool stuff. Thanks to the cloud, all your technology folks are now part of the increased agility discussion in your company, whereas before cloud they really weren’t.

Awesome!

To summarize: Cloud is somebody else’s computer where security is the most important concern. Cloud hosting providers like AWS have you covered. In fact, migrating workloads and applications to the cloud will increase your agility and amplify your company’s digital transformation journey.

Now that we understand the basics of cloud and AWS, it’s time to learn about AWS design principles and building blocks, as well as some key differences between AWS and other cloud platforms.

Continue learning. Read the next blog in this series: Getting Started with AWS in 2002: Design & Building Blocks