Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of compute power, database, storage, applications, and other IT resources through a cloud services platform through the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Traditionally, a developer looking to build an application had to procure, set up, and maintain physical infrastructure and the application. This is where cloud computing comes in. A cloud services platform provides rapid access to flexible and low-cost IT resources that you can use to build and maintain software and databases, and create applications to delight customers. You don’t need to make large upfront investments in hardware and spend a lot of time on the heavy lifting of managing that hardware. You can access as many resources as you need, almost instantly, and only pay for what you use. On-demand, pay-as-you-go access to services is fundamental to the cloud computing model.
The cloud provides developers with greater flexibility, scalability, and faster time to innovation. With cloud computing, you can
- Pay as you go - Pay only when you use computing resources, and only for how much you use.
- Benefit from massive economies of scale - AWS aggregates usage from hundreds of thousands of customers in the cloud, which leads to higher economies of scale. This translates into lower pay-as-you-go prices.
- Stop guessing capacity - When you make a capacity decision prior to deploying an application, you often end up either sitting on expensive idle resources or dealing with limited capacity. With cloud computing, you can access as much or as little capacity as you need, and scale up and down as required with only a few minutes notice.
- Increase speed and agility - IT resources are only a click away, which means that you reduce the time to make resources available to your developers from weeks to minutes. This dramatically increases agility for the organization, because the cost and time it takes to experiment and develop is significantly lower.
- Realize cost savings - Companies can focus on projects that differentiate their business instead of maintaining data centers. With cloud computing, you can focus on your customers, rather than on the heavy lifting of racking, stacking, and powering physical infrastructure.
- Go global in minutes - Applications can be deployed in multiple Regions around the world with a few clicks. This means that you can provide lower latency and a better experience for your customers at a minimal cost.
AWS provides on-demand delivery of technology services through the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. This is known as cloud computing.
The AWS Cloud encompasses a broad set of global cloud-based products that includes compute, storage, databases, analytics, networking, mobile, developer tools, management tools, IoT, security, and enterprise applications: on-demand, available in seconds, with pay-as-you-go pricing. With over 200 fully featured services available from data centers globally, the AWS Cloud has what you need to develop, deploy, and operate your applications, all while lowering costs, becoming more agile, and innovating faster.
For example, with the AWS Cloud, you can spin up a virtual machine, specifying the number of vCPU cores, memory, storage, and other characteristics in seconds, and pay for the infrastructure in per-second increments only while it is running. One benefit of the AWS global infrastructure network is that you can provision resources in the Region or Regions that best serve your specific use case. When you are done with the resources, you can simply delete them. With this built-in flexibility and scalability, you can build an application to serve your first customer, and then scale to serve your next 100 million.