Agility
Thanks to the pay-as-you-go model of AWS, engineers can really focus on innovation and new business solutions instead of worrying about infrastructure and other resource shortfalls.
Before the broad adoption of AWS solutions, engineers would waste time and money overprovisioning resources in an attempt to provide reliability and performance, even under peak load conditions. AWS allows cloud engineers to “spin up” new resources in seconds and view these resources as temporary and disposable. In fact, it is not uncommon for AWS customers to deploy massive amounts of infrastructure for a very short period of time in order to test new technologies without paying massive up-front costs.
At an AWS re:Invent conference, I heard about a large university that needed to conduct some artificial intelligence testing. The university turned to AWS for help and spun up millions of CPUs across hundreds of thousands of EC2 virtual machines. The university required this horsepower only over the course of a weekend. All the resources were “terminated” (that’s the AWS term for deleting an EC2 VM) once the testing was complete. Amazon did not tell us what the bill was for this weekend of work, but the cost of all those resources if purchased as CapEx would have been massive, and the university would have been stuck with those unneeded resources when the testing was complete.
Amazon Web Services enables an organization to be flexible with the provisioning of resources because there are far fewer constraints. Efficiency is also achieved because the duration to provision new resources is remarkably small.
One of the most significant advantages companies see in moving to AWS is the ability to increase their agility. There are three main aspects of AWS that accomplish this:
Speed: The AWS global infrastructure spans the entire globe. This global reach ensures that you can place resources geographically close to those that need to consume them. This reduces latency and fosters excellent performance. As described earlier, massive amounts of resources can be provisioned within seconds in the AWS Cloud.
Experimentation: With AWS, you can implement your IT operations as code. In addition to allowing you to run with administrative ease and without errors, AWS fosters the ease of experimentation and testing. Templates are available with services like AWS CloudFormation that permit you to instantly create complex networks and IT resources for testing and experimenting. Remember that once you are done experimenting, you can dispose of the resources and are no longer charged for their use. Figure 2-5 shows an example of CloudFormation.
Figure 2-5 CloudFormation in AWS
Culture of innovation: These enablers of agility previously listed also help foster a culture of innovation in your enterprise. In fact, an increasing number of companies participate in AWS functions because of this. It is no longer merely about saving costs for them. They love the ability to experiment with new technologies at very low risk to their organization. New innovations are very possible thanks to AWS.