Today, it is no secret that a cloud-based approach is the fastest, more affordable, and increasingly adaptable solution for companies compared to in-house servers.
Cloud technology is greatly scalable and capable of providing almost unlimited computing power and data storage. And AWS (Amazon Web Services) has plenty of other features that can be interesting specifically for startup businesses.
Flexibility and customization
Cost and affordability are among the most important criteria that will concern a startup company. While maintenance of private servers requires a lot of upfront expenses in hardware and installation, AWS offers customers to choose necessary features “on demand”, so you don’t have to pay for the resources you don’t use. The solution has a marketplace where you can select only those applications you need.
This also opens a window of opportunities for potential customization and adjustment of business as it evolves over time.
Integration of machine learning and AI
Today, it is a matter of the competitive necessity to implement innovative digital technologies like AI and machine learning because of their unparalleled benefits. Now, these solutions have become an integral part of any digital business, and AWS offers a big number of services organized around AI and machine learning.
Reliability and performance
While traditional hosting services use dedicated server systems, this is not always a reliable solution. If one of these servers goes down, the application or site will stop working which may inevitably lead to lost revenues and major disruptions. Alternatively, using AWS Cloud, data infrastructure is safe and secured because it doesn’t rely on just one server – there is always a backup server ready to prevent any outages.
Another thing that can become useful, especially for startup businesses, is AWS Auto Scaling, an automated system for monitoring upcoming scaling plans for the company. With both of these features combined, a customer will have a system with the best security, reduced chance of server interruptions, and automated adaptability.
No downtimes
Traditional in-house servers always have service gaps and downtimes due to provisioning, which leads to lost revenue. Cloud-based technology is an unquestionable solution to this matter. AWS Cloud was created with these concerns in mind in order to eliminate any downtimes and make transitions smoother in that regard. The CodeDeploy feature built in AWS is capable of automating software deployment and rolling out new updates without any risks compared to manual roll-outs.
Great variety of features
The product list of AWS features contains more than 200 resources that an experienced development team can use to profit a business. Many of these resources are customized for specific target goals and industry fields. The range of features includes data management, computing, analytics, developer and manager tools, mobile access, databases, networking, IoT, security, and enterprise applications.
One of the prominent examples of such features is the Fault Injection Simulator, which can simulate errors and perform controlled experiments to fix potential breakdowns before the launch. This feature alone is capable of saving a lot of expenses for the startup company by avoiding costly interruptions.
AWS Free Tier and digital courses
AWS offers a free trial run before a customer commits to a long-term cloud plan. It is convenient if the business is young, therefore AWS lets developers get a free hands-on experience with the ability to explore more than a hundred product features. For instance, a customer can test the API with the existing software and check if it is compatible or if it can be of any use for them without any investments.
As an additional feature, AWS provides more than 500 free digital courses that can be helpful for the developers in order to raise their skill level regarding AWS Cloud features at no extra cost.
The competition
The market of cloud platforms is vast and there is no shortage of options there. The most noticeable options, like Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure, are great, but AWS powers more than a third of the entire cloud computing market due to its state-of-the-art features.
One of these features is the advanced container management. These containers are data packages that include the data itself and instructions on how to use this data. Google made a certain achievement by using an open-source technology to develop widely used Kubernetes software, which in fact is used by Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. In this regard, AWS took it a step further and developed tools, like Elastic Container Service, Elastic Kubernetes Service, and AWS Fargate, that cater to certain workloads and provide better container optimization that greatly simplifies the scalability of the project. According to lead DevOps engineer of iTechArt, Semyon Gordeev, the project complexity doesn’t matter – the provided scalability is always consistent and reliable, and diverse roll out options are relatively simple.
The right choice for startups
There are, of course, a lot of factors to consider, to choose the right option between the number of platforms in the cloud provider space. In that regard, AWS has a great number of advantages: it offers a vast variety of available services and ease of access, with a competitive and flexible pricing system. In addition, it has the industry's best client list. All these aspects make the AWS solution a great choice for any startup digital business. It doesn’t take away from the other options on the market which are also outstanding, but as a whole, the AWS Cloud is the most favorable alternative, particularly for young businesses. The fast scaling of startups and demands for adding new apps and features perfectly matches up with the flexibility of the AWS platform, so the customer will focus on business growth, strategy assessment, and performance without any technical limitations.