What is the Cloud?

Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the internet with pay as--you-go pricing. You no longer have to manage and maintain your own hardware in your own data centers. Companies like AWS own and maintain these data centers and provide virtualized data center technologies and services to users over the internet. 

In the past, companies and organizations hosted and maintained hardware such as compute, storage, and networking equipment in their own data centers. They needed to allocate entire infrastructure departments to take care of them, resulting in a costly operation that made some workloads and experimentation impossible. 

If you run your application on-premises, creating this additional environment requires you to buy and install hardware, connect the necessary cabling, provision power, install operating systems, and more. All of these tasks can be time-consuming and take days to perform. Meanwhile, the new product feature’s time-to-market is increasing and your developers are waiting for this environment. 

If you ran your application in the cloud, you can replicate the entire environment as often as needed in a matter of minutes or even seconds. Instead of physically installing hardware and connecting cabling, you can logically manage your physical infrastructure over the internet. 

Using cloud computing not only saves you time from the set-up perspective, but it also removes the undifferentiated heavy lifting. If you look at any application, you’ll see that some of the aspects of it are very important to your business, like the code. However, there are other aspects that are no different than any other application you might make: for instance the compute the code runs on. By removing repetitive common tasks that don’t differentiate your business, like installing virtual machines, or storing backups, you can focus on what is strategically unique to your business and let AWS handle the tasks that are time consuming and don’t separate you from your competitors. 

So where does AWS fit into all of this? Well AWS simply just provides cloud computing services. Those IT resources mentioned in the cloud computing definition are AWS services in this case. We’ll need to use these AWS services to architect a scalable, highly available, and cost effective infrastructure to host our corporate directory application. This way we can get our corporate directory app out into the world quickly, without having to manage any heavy-duty physical hardware. There are the six main advantages to running your workloads on AWS.