Cloud Computing refers to the on-demand delivery of IT resources via the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing.
Cloud Computing helps you reduce your overall IT costs in multiple ways. Our massive economies of scale and efficiency improvements allow us to continually lower prices, and our multiple pricing models allow you to optimize costs for both variable and stable workloads. Additionally, Cloud Computing drives down up-front and on-going IT labor costs and gives you access to a highly distributed, full-featured platform at a fraction of the cost of traditional infrastructure.
Building on-premises infrastructure can be slow and expensive. There is expensive hardware that needs to be ordered, paid for, installed and configured - and all of this needs to happen long before you actually need it. With Cloud Computing, you don’t have to spend time on these activities; instead you just pay for the resources you consume on a variable basis.
Cloud Computing lets you shift resources away from data center investments and operations and move them to innovative new projects. Specifically, you can have your scarce IT and engineering resources focus on projects that grow your business instead of having them focus on IT infrastructure - which is important but hardly ever differentiates your business.
Predicting how customers are going to adopt your new application is difficult, and it’s hard to get right. So, when you make a capacity decision prior to deploying an application, you often either end up sitting on expensive idle resources or dealing with limited capacity. If you run out of capacity then you are faced with a poor customer experience until you can acquire more resources. With Cloud Computing, these problems go away. You provision the amount of resources you need. If you need more, you can easily scale up. If you don’t need them, just turn them off and stop paying.
With traditional infrastructure, it can take weeks to get a server procured, delivered, and running. These long timelines stifle innovation. With Cloud Computing, you can provision resources as you need them. You can deploy hundreds or even thousands of servers in minutes, without talking to anyone. This self-service environment changes how quickly you can develop and deploy applications and allows your team to experiment more quickly and more frequently.
Whether you are a large global company or small start-up, you may have potential customers around the world. With traditional infrastructure, it’s hard to deliver great performance to a broadly distributed user base and most companies focus on one geographic region at a time to save costs and time. With Cloud Computing, the game changes - you can easily deploy your application in any or all of the nine AWS regions around the world. This means you can provide a lower latency and better experience for your customers at minimal cost.