When do you use Amazon Web Services (AWS)?

AWS is ideal for start-ups or scale-ups. When launching a new service or product in the market, many things are still unknown. How many visitors will my website get? How many users will my SaaS platform have in a year? Additionally, when rapidly scaling a product or service, it's often unclear how much computing power and storage will be needed.

Because you don't have historical data to base predictions on, many dimensions such as memory capacity and processors are undefined. Purchasing too much, or over-provisioning, can be expensive. Under-provisioning means a lack of capacity, which can result in your website or SaaS being slow or inaccessible. AWS helps mitigate this problem.

AWS operates on a pay-per-use basis. This means you only pay for the computing power or storage you actually use. As a result, AWS easily adapts to your organization's needs. This makes AWS highly suitable for products or services that scale rapidly or are unsure about their computing power and storage requirements.

An important advantage of AWS is uptime and quality. As an organization, you naturally want your website or application to be online and accessible at all times. When the system hosting your website or application doesn't function properly, it can cost a lot of money.

To ensure uptime, you need to diversify risks. This means that as an organization, you should subscribe to at least 2 cloud services so that you can always guarantee the uptime of one of the two. On a local or national scale, this is manageable, but it can be cumbersome.

On an international scale, however, guaranteeing uptime by subscribing to multiple cloud services is nearly impossible. Moreover, it's extremely costly, inefficient, and time-consuming. That's why companies like Netflix host their services on AWS. Managing hosting on an international scale is simply not cost-effective.

The advantage of AWS is that it allows you to efficiently spread hosting risks in one go. When a server goes offline or encounters other issues, Amazon temporarily hosts your website from another server. This ensures uptime at significantly lower costs than if you were to manage it yourself.

In the past, managing your own database, server, and capacity was a necessity. It required someone with specialized knowledge and specific training who had to be continuously available. Not only was it expensive, but also unnecessary since the work required little time. Those days are now behind us.

With AWS, you no longer need to invest time in peripheral matters and can focus on application development. AWS ensures that the workload is distributed across multiple servers, using load balancing. Amazon also offers high availability. They route traffic to another server when the original server is unavailable. This ensures that your application is always accessible.

Increasingly, processes around us are being automated. Complex algorithms that make predictions and make the right decisions based on data are being used more frequently. Many applications already have AI models, but there are cases where a custom AI needs to be trained.

In addition to a large amount of data, an immense amount of computing power is required to process all this data and train an AI. AWS is highly suitable for this due to its scalability and virtually unlimited computing power. You have access to as much computing power as you need and only pay for the computing power you use. This allows you to cost-effectively develop your own AI model to predict actions based on historical data. For example, a recommendation engine for e-commerce applications or for speech and image recognition.

In addition to training your own AI, you can also apply existing models to your organization. Through the AWS Marketplace, you can purchase existing AI models for tasks such as image and speech recognition or building your own chatbot.

To comply with the GDPR, it is necessary to store data of European citizens within the European Union, including both the original data and backups. With AWS, you can easily meet a crucial requirement of the GDPR.

AWS allows users to choose where their data is stored. The service is divided into different Regions, and customers can select the Region in which their data is located. For example, there are Regions in Ireland, London, Frankfurt, or Paris. Each of these Regions is further divided into at least two completely separate Availability Zones to ensure uptime. If one of the zones becomes unavailable due to reasons such as a fire, all data can still be hosted from the other zone.

In addition to all the reasons mentioned earlier, AWS provides a platform for innovation. When innovation within your organization stagnates, migrating to AWS could breathe new life into it. Things that were previously challenging to implement are now within reach.

Sping is an expert in AWS migrations. We have 5 certified specialists who have successfully executed migrations to AWS for 8 different organizations. An important focus for us is our unique method that allows us to perform migrations without downtime. First, we examine your architecture, how the new platform should be set up, and the data to be transferred. Then, we configure everything according to your preferences, manage the software, and conduct thorough testing. Only when everything is working at 100%, do we switch to the operational AWS platform.

If you would like to learn more about the benefits of migrating to AWS for your organization, please contact Jan Gerard Snip, Partner Manager AWS.