Cloud computing solutions are vital to the digital transformation of small and medium businesses in today’s scenario. AWS provides cloud-based resources like servers, databases, software, and storage. It is the world’s most comprehensive cloud offering 200+ fully featured services from globally distributed data centers. As an infrastructure operations management service, AWS Managed Service allows access and management of Amazon cloud tools from a centralized point.
AWS Benefits for SMBs
AWS makes the adoption of cloud easy for SMBs so that they can quickly focus on development. Following are some benefits of AWS that make it stand out as an industry leader as a cloud solutions provider:
Cost Effectiveness
AWS frees up small and medium businesses from the complexities of infrastructure management. Businesses reap the benefit of storing data in state-of-the-art data warehouses by paying only for the amount of space they use and also scaling up instantly as required. Solutions ships with various pricing models that allow companies to pay for exactly the amount of resources they use. On-demand pricing model of AWS allows billing at an hourly rate or even for an incremented use of a second. This allows enterprises to choose exactly what they need and escape overprovisioning. There are services like AWS Instance Scheduler to automatically kill idle instances so that the customer doesn’t pay for them. The AWS free tier opens up 100+ offer AWS products for free trial. Eligible startups can reap the benefits of AWS free credits. Credits can be utilized for AWS services and AWS support and explore free tier products for up to 12 months.
Elasticity
Elasticity is the ability to scale up or down resources on demand. Scaling on demand is a great property of AWS storage and instances that adds flexibility to businesses in utilizing resources as the workload changes and pays for only what they consume. The autoscaling features of the AWS ecosystem also free businesses from the task of manually integrating and managing instances and resources and concentrating on their key functionalities.
Serverless Computing
AWS is a big promoter of serverless computing. AWS Serverless computing takes care of provisioning, scaling, and infrastructure management for cloud customers. This is a great opportunity for SMBs to explore the benefits of cloud computing without investing hugely in infrastructure and opex. A great benefit of serverless computing is that businesses can build their applications using their familiar language and tools and straightaway deploy without worrying about integration.
Security
A cloud solution provider like AWS provides end-to-end security for the cloud infrastructure. AWS storages comes with different layers of access and authentication protocol. This allows businesses to segregate data in the public domain and for internal operations. Data is stored in secure AWS datacenters across the globe. There are a lot of pay-as-you-go security models that the SMBs can opt for considering their business nature. A lot of security features like encryption, backups, and remote work protection are part of the AWS cloud offerings. AWS being a global cloud resource provider is also automatically compliant with a number of compliance standards like HIPAA, GDPR, ISO, etc.
Global Infrastructure
AWS is one of the largest public cloud service providers with warehouses and datacenters spread across the globe. The global presence of AWS allows businesses to sell and service their products worldwide. It is spread across 33 geographic regions with 99 Availability Zones (AZs). Each AZ is isolated from the rest and keeps the servers safe from external issues. The global presence of AWS cloud allows businesses to integrate information and workload monitored over a common platform.
Popular AWS Innovations Transforming SMB Work Practices
AWS offers a host of solutions and services across the full spectrum of cloud and data engineering with a global presence. This enables SMBs to stay within the same ecosystem, developers access tools and SDKs required throughout the entire SDLC of a product, leverage specific suites and technologies popular to a region or industry, and seek the help of an extensive community for solutions. Below are some of the most popular services and solutions of AWS.
Amazon S3
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) provides object storage, which is built for storing and recovering any amount of information or data from anywhere over the internet. S3 facilitated easier web-scaling for developers with 99.999999999 percent durability and 99.99 percent availability of objects. Data is stored in “storage classes” and charges are pay-as-you-go and can be easily scaled to fulfill workload demands. The simplicity of S3 storage makes it an encouraging solution for enterprises without much technical talent.
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda is a serverless computing service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Users of AWS Lambda create functions, self-contained applications written in one of the supported languages and runtimes, and upload them to AWS Lambda, which executes those functions in an efficient and flexible manner.
The Lambda functions fill the primary role of the compute service on the AWS serverless stack, from serving web pages and processing streams of data to calling APIs and integrating with other AWS services. It also integrates with many other AWS services and, together with API Gateway, DynamoDB, and RDS, forms the basis for Serverless solutions for those using AWS.
Lambda supports many of the most popular languages and runtimes, so it’s a good fit for a wide range of Serverless developers.
Amazon EC2
AWS EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)allows businesses to rent virtual computers. It is an on-demand computing service on the AWS cloud platform billed monthly depending on usage. It offers all the services a computing device can offer like RAM, ROM, and storage allocation by the user. The user is also free to dismantle the virtual device on completion of the task.
The OS and necessary software to manage EC2 are already provided by AWS. The user role is confined to launching and terminating EC2 instances. Autoscaling groups can be attached to the EC2 instances to scale the configuration based on the incoming traffic. All this offers great flexibility in terms of cost and hasslefree infrastructure management for businesses.
Amazon Aurora DB
Amazon Aurora DB blends the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. It is a relational database management system (RDBMS) with fully managed MySQL- and PostgreSQL compatibility.
Replicas of Aurora DB can be created and distributed across multiple Availability zones through Aurora DB clusters which in turn reduce the local read/write speed of DB instances. This makes it a viable infrastructure component for businesses aiming to launch global products.
Other benefits of Amazon Aurora include autoscaling, pay-as-you-go model, isolated network security, and free monitoring with Amazon Cloudwatch.
Amazon Redshift
AWS Redshift is a data warehousing solution from Amazon Web Services. Redshift shines in its ability to handle huge volumes of data — capable of processing structured and unstructured data in the range of exabytes (1018 bytes). Businesses looking for large-scale data migrations can benefit from Redshift.
Redshift follows MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) design enabling outstanding speed in delivery to queries made on a large database with exabytes of data. Another amazing feature of Redshift is in combining multiple data sources and processing structured, and unstructured data to offer business insights that traditional business intelligence tools lack the capability to handle.
Amazon Kinesis
Amazon Kinesis is an Amazon Web Service designed to process large-scale data streams from a multitude of services in real-time. It operates as a middleman between various data generating sources, to allow other applications or services to work with the source data.
One of the key benefits of Kinesis is that it allows you to process and analyze data nearly immediately, rather than waiting for a complete dataset to arrive, then processing it, and then delivering it for analysis. Insights can be derived in minutes, rather than hours, days, or weeks. Kinesis makes this possible without weeks of complicated setup, as it is delivered as a managed platform, meaning you do not have to manage any infrastructure.
Kinesis Firehose is used to reliably load large-scale streaming data into data lakes, data sources, and analytics services. Firehose can ingest, process, and deliver streaming data to any number of endpoints and services. This can include Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon ElasticSearch Service, or generic HTTP endpoints, as well as service providers. It supports compression, batch processing, and can transform and encrypt data streams prior to loading, increasing security, and reducing storage costs.
Amazon API Gateway
Amazon API Gateway is a managed service that allows developers to define the HTTP endpoints of a REST API or a WebSocket API and connect those endpoints with the corresponding backend business logic. It also handles authentication, access control, monitoring, and tracing of API requests.
Many Serverless applications use Amazon API Gateway, which conveniently replaces the API servers with a managed serverless solution.
Within the Serverless ecosystem, API Gateway is the piece that ties together Serverless functions and API definitions. Being able to trigger the execution of a Serverless function directly in response to an HTTP request is the key reason why API Gateway is so valuable in Serverless setups: it enables a truly serverless architecture for web applications. When using API Gateway together with other AWS services, it’s possible to build a fully functional customer-facing web application without maintaining a single server yourself.
Conclusion
As we can see the AWS ecosystem is a tremendous resource for SMBs interested in cloud computing technologies. It offers a host of solutions from storage, data analysis, dynamic scaling, API integration, and serverless computing. AWS continues to innovate and upgrade its existing solutions catering to the unique needs of businesses under a single umbrella. The seamless integration and management of AWS solutions by the cloud provider makes it a primary choice for SMBs that
