Benefits of the AWS Cloud

Cloud computing means renting IT resources on demand over the internet and paying only for what you use, instead of buying and running your own data centers. Expect questions that describe a business problem and ask which cloud benefit solves it.

The value proposition

• Trade fixed expense for variable expense: Pay for resources as you consume them instead of investing up front in hardware you might not fully use.
• Benefit from massive economies of scale: AWS buys and operates at huge scale, so its per-unit costs are lower, and it passes savings on as lower prices.
• Stop guessing capacity: Scale up or down to match real demand instead of over-provisioning for peaks or running out of capacity.
• Increase speed and agility: New resources are minutes away, so teams can experiment and ship faster and at lower cost of failure.
• Stop spending money on data centers: Focus effort on your product and customers rather than racking, powering, and cooling servers.
• Go global in minutes: Deploy into Regions around the world to serve users with lower latency.

Global infrastructure benefits

• Speed of deployment: Infrastructure already exists worldwide; you provision it through an API or console in minutes.
• Global reach: Many Regions and hundreds of edge locations let you put applications and cached content close to users.

High availability, elasticity, agility

• High availability: Systems keep running when a component fails, usually by spreading resources across multiple Availability Zones.
• Elasticity: Capacity grows and shrinks automatically with demand (for example, Auto Scaling adds instances at peak and removes them later).
• Scalability: The ability to handle more load by adding resources. Elasticity is scalability that happens automatically and in both directions.
• Agility: How quickly you can try new ideas: provisioning in minutes, low cost to experiment, easy to throw away.