Companies of all sizes are moving to AWS

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December 18, 2015

Companies of all sizes are moving to AWS

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Amazon has changed the face of the world with its cloud services, and now Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a set of cloud services often used by startups, big companies, and government agencies. AWS lets companies buy powerful computers cheaply and whenever they need them to handle traffic, to store video, to power a database. We might actually say that AWS is the piece of infrastructure that has enabled the current tech boom.

By shifting to the cloud, enterprises can bring up new servers in minutes translating into shorter downtimes, rapid experimentation, more innovation, increased global reach and more successful projects. Here are the top reasons why so many companies of all sizes are moving to AWS:

Reduced costs – the pay-per-use is an attractive pricing model for both startups and enterprises. Users who have highly variable computing needs may realize significant savings with their IT costs.
Scalability – AWS instances can be easily ramped up or down. Organizations experiencing a large spike in traffic due to a hot selling product, a major news release or seasonality can truly appreciate this capability.
Speed and agility – companies can develop and deploy applications faster by acquiring almost instant access to virtually unlimited computing power. Software providers can deploy their products in a SaaS model, eliminating the need for clients to install the software locally or maintain their own internal data centers
No capital expenses – AWS works as an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) which enables companies to establish their data center in the cloud with no investment in physical hardware or data center space.
Self-service model – IT teams can easily make changes to their environments and there is no need for physical hardware upgrades.

Not convinced yet? Just take a look at seven of the most popular brands that trust AWS with their workloads:

Netflix – Netflix recently made headlines when it announced it was moving entirely to AWS public cloud. By having its own resilience strategy, Netflix stayed operational during the last major AWS outage.
Samsung – The Samsung Printing Apps Center was originally deployed on AWS. By using AWS, the division was able to deploy its Printing Apps Center on time and has the scalability to handle periods when downloads cause traffic spikes.
Yelp – Yelp.com provides consumers with crowd-sourced reviews about local businesses. It connects its data centers to the cloud using AWS Direct Connect to access a range of AWS services for its Dev & Test, Automated Testing systems, staging areas, and production workloads. Using AWS, Yelp dramatically improved its development productivity by reducing test-run times by as much as 90 percent.
Airbnb – Airbnb’s entire database is in Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). The reason why Airbnb runs on the public cloud in the first place is pretty simple: If they don’t have teams worrying about making sure servers are up and running, they can spend more time working on the things that matter to Airbnb’s business.
Time Inc – Time is in the process of migrating five of its data centers to AWS. Time is starting with basic compute, networking, and storage, but Colin Bodell, the CTO of Time Inc., expects to use Amazon Web Services’ more advanced services as it moves deeper into the digital age of publishing.
Nokia – The telecommunications giant provides mobile Internet services for emerging markets in India, Asia Pacific, Africa, and South America, running on 2200 servers and collecting 800 GB of log data daily. The volume of data became too large for the traditional relational database and Nokia could no longer scale the database and generate reports. By moving to AWS and using Amazon Redshift as a fast, fully managed data warehouse, Nokia is now able to run queries twice as fast as its previous solution and can use business intelligence tools to mine and analyze big data at a 50% costs savings.
Novartis – Pharmaceutical giant Novartis built a platform using AWS tools to screen certain compounds against cancer. They calculated that it would take 50,000 cores and close to a $40 million investment if they wanted to run the experiment internally. Partnering AWS, Novartis built a platform leveraging Amazon S3, Amazon EBS, and four Availability Zones. The project ran across 10,600 Spot Instances and allowed Novartis to conduct 39 years of computational chemistry in 9 hours for a cost of $4,232.