AWS Value and Widest Service offering

In this topic, we are going to look at the AWS value and widest service offering. In addition to the 142 services that Amazon currently has they are constantly rolling out new once in an average about 2-5 new services per quarter. They are also continuously improving existing services such as Cross-region AMI Support.

AWS Value and Widest Service offering

Flexible pricing models, but some time confusion pricing models

  • No up-front costs
    • You can get started with the service and try with before you buy it (Allows “try before you buy”)
  • Pay as you go
    • Only pay for what you use, when you use it. For example, if you only need a small server for one hour that’s all you have to pay for.
  • They have a FREE tier
    • Every service has a “FREE tier” which lets users try the service
    • In the case of EC2, the “t1.micro” server can actually be left on 24×7, all year (you can use it to host a small blog for free).

One of the Flexible pricing models is usage-based pricing

  • AWS determines the price by two or more dimensions of each service. For example, In the case of EC2, it charged at a high level by the hourly cost according to the server run as well as data transfer cost in and out of the server. The reason Amazon breaks down like this, Is that they only want customers to pay what they are using. This makes the pricing model very confusing.
    • Charged hourly on EC2 instance
    • Charged by Data transfer
    • You have to choose one of the instance type Amazon to provide
    • You have the option to reserve the instance which is running
    • Reserved instances like 1 or 3-year term
    • Either it is for high or low usage
    • Don’t forget the spot instance – use this for cost-saving

Amazon has the widest Service offering of any public cloud provider.

  • There are 142 services listed on the AWS platform that are categorized into 19 different types
    • In the Compute we have popular products like EC2, EMR…
    • On Storage, we have S3, EBS, and others
    • From the Database side, we have RDS, DynamoDB, and others
    • There are several application services used such as SNS, SQS…
    • There are Networking Services such as Route53(DNS), VPC…
    • There are also deployment and management services such as IAM, Cloud Formation
  • Closest competition right now is Azure and Google Cloud
    • They’re way behind
    • But could catch up in 2-3 years

Bulk Pricing passed on to customers:

  • Able to negotiate unbeatable deals on hardware, power, bandwidth
  • AWS has chopped prices since it launched

This topic was about AWS value and widest service offering.

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