Unlock the Power of the Cloud With AWS

The global market for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is estimated to reach $97.6 billion¹ by 2023 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25.7% when compared with $31.1 billion growth in 2018. CIOs understand how the market is maturing and how evolving technologies demand improvement(s) in their cloud infrastructure or full migration to the cloud.

In fact, most of the businesses have undergone cloud migration through the help of managed service providers (MSP) to improve the reliability and efficiency of their IT operations, eliminating possibilities of high infrastructure costs and severe security issues.

As we talk about managed cloud services, Amazon Web Services (AWS) counts among the many flexible and secure cloud computing environments. AWS is known to ensure privacy of the data stored in its data centers, offering scalability at the same time. It is becoming the topmost choice for businesses that look for:

The Power of Cloud Computing

Virtual Servers

As cloud applications have a ton of requirements for computing, network, and memory resources, Amazon EC2 offers scalable computing capacity in the AWS cloud. It enables you to minimize the time taken to obtain and boot new server instances to a few minutes, helping you to quickly scale capacity. Businesses don’t need to invest in hardware up front, making it easy to develop and deploy applications faster.

Container Management

Amazon EC2 Container Services is known to be a high performance, highly scalable container management service that supports Docker containers. Through this container service, you can easily run distributed applications on a managed cluster of Amazon EC2 instances.

Running Code in Response to Events

AWS Lambda compute service runs your code in response to events. You can easily build applications that respond faster to new information, as AWS Lambda automatically manages the computing resources for you. As you supply the code, this compute service begins to run your code within milliseconds of an event.

It performs the entire administration of the computing resources, that includes an operating system and server maintenance. AWS Lambda also takes care of code and security patch deployment, capacity provisioning and automatic scaling, as well as code monitoring and logging.

Security

Amazon Web Services engage with independent certifying bodies and third-party auditors, and this offers significant information to customers on the policies, controls, and processes. Relevant attestations, certifications, and reports comprise of SOC1/ISAE 3402, SOC2, SOC3, ISO 27001, PCI DSS Level 1, FIPS 140-2, IRAP, HIPAA, MPAA, DoD CSM Levels 1-2, 3-5, DIACAP and FISMA, FedRAMP (SM), ITAR, ISO 9001, CSA, and MTCS Tier 3 Certification.

Identity & Access Management

1. AWS identity and access management enables you to create and manage users as well as groups. You can even use permissions to control access to Amazon resources. As you gain control access to your cloud resources at granular levels, there is more secure application deployment and easy implementation of cloud security policies.

2. AWS Directory Service helps you connect your AWS resources with an existing on-premise Microsoft Active Directory. You can even set up a new, stand-alone directory in the AWS Cloud platform. Integrating with existing identity and access management systems allows you to use identities in your current systems to access your cloud resources.

3. The CloudHSM service by AWS gives you access to dedicated Hardware Security Modules (HSM) appliances within the Amazon Web Services Cloud. The objective, here, is to protect your encryption keys within HSMs designed and validated to U.S. Government standards, to enable secure key management deployed in the cloud.

Storage

AWS offers cloud storage services for you to access the amount of storage that you need. Amazon S3 helps you store and access any amount of data anytime, anywhere. It expands storage faster and allows the infrastructure to meet user demand.

Through Amazon S3, not only can you control permissions to the stored data, but also build big data, transcoding, analytics, and archive applications.

Besides, it provides you the Standard-Infrequent Access Tier. It comes with minimum 30-day storage and reduced cost.

Amazon S3 also offers the Standard-Infrequent Access tier, which has the same durability but at a reduced cost with a 30-day storage minimum. This is ideal for less active data that needs immediate access.

Archival Storage

Amazon Glacier’s low-cost service features high durability storage to archive and backup for a minimum of $0.01 per gigabyte per month. Choose a low-cost service with quite high durability and availability, in the case of infrequently accessed data.

Shared File Storage

Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), a shared file system for Amazon EC2 instances, allows you to easily and quickly create and configure file systems for software or content repositories, and home directories.

Developer Tools

AWS CodeDeploy

The simple code deployment service has the following features:

• Automatic Deployment across varied environments and deployment targets that count in thousands.
• Application health tracking, while performing rolling updates across deployment targets.
• Integration with existing configuration management tools (Chef, Ansible, Puppet), continuous integration tools (Bamboo, CircleCI, Jenkins), and version control tools (AWSCodeCommit, GitHub) and other Amazon Web Services.
• Monitoring and implementing the deployment process, besides generating reports.

AWS CodeCommit

This source control storage and version code service enable your IT team with effective code management and collaboration while leveraging on the advantages of continuous integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD). AWS CodeCommit helps you to store and manage assets, like source code, documents, and binary files.

• AWS CodeCommit eliminates the monotony of resource management, thus offering high service durability and availability.
• This service securely stores data, as the data stored is encrypted at rest and in transit.
• It allows you to collaboratively work with the code. Code updates can be pushed and merged in the repository, where users can comment and review on one another’s code.
• You can scale up or down to meet your growing IT needs, as AWS CodeCommit can handle huge repositories, files with large branches, and long commit histories.
• AWS CodeCommit can seamlessly integrate with other Amazon Web Services and third-party services.
• Any Git-based repository can easily be migrated to CodeCommit.

AWS CodePipeline

This fully managed continuous delivery service enables you to automate your release pipelines. This leads to quick and reliable application and infrastructure updates. With CodePipeline, you can automate the build, test, and deploy release process phases, every time a code change takes place, basis the release model defined.

In addition, this fully managed service integrates well with third-party services, such as GitHub or your own custom plugin. As there are no upfront fees, you only pay for what you use.

• AWS CodePipeline automates the software release process. You can thus iterate on feedback and release new features to users faster.
• It allows you to model varied stages of your software release process through the console interface, AWS CloudFormation, the AWS CLI, or the AWS SDKs.
• Specifying the tests to run and customizing the steps becomes much easy, as you deploy your application and its dependencies.
• AWS CodePipeline enables you to model your software release process.
• The fully managed continuous delivery service has the scope to adapt to your specific requirements. Use your own custom plugins or pre-built plugins during the release process.

Support

As you may need support anytime, anywhere, AWS provides basic support to all customers without charging anything additional. Customers with operational issues or technical questions can contact support engineers to receive personalized support within the expected response times.

You may opt for a tier that fulfills your specific needs. You are free from long-term commitments due to monthly pricing and unlimited support cases. AWS Basic Support allows customers to access the Resource Center, Product FAQs, Service Health Dashboard, Support for Health Checks, and Discussion Forums. In case you are looking for a higher level of support, you may subscribe to AWS Support at the developer, business, or developer level.

The fixing of issues totally depends on the issue at hand. Challenges application or service developers face differs quite a bit. This makes it difficult to predict the time taken for resolution. But all efforts are directed to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.

In Conclusion: Cloud-based environments are becoming more and more complex, which is why, you need to choose a managed service provider for the right mix of services. They can meet users’ expectations in a fully hybrid cloud model. While taking care of your new cloud infrastructure, they manage hybrid environments that include data center resources, public, and private clouds.

In this context, enterprises of today use AWS to ensure a higher level of data privacy and security, low cost, less infrastructure need, and minimized cost. No commitment and pay as you go model, besides security and customization feature, makes AWS popular among the host of cloud computing and cloud migration service providers.

1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Global Markets to 2023, February 2019 report by BCC Research