Understanding The

Benefits Of Amazon

EC2

The first hurdle for developers to even visualize scaling up

their websites or applications is the amount of investment for

upgrading their server space.

Once they have secured the funds, the next hurdle is

ascertaining the machine configurations, keeping in mind the

expectation for further growth.

This leaves a large room for error if the growth of the

company does not go as planned. That is where Amazon’s

Web Services (AWS) comes in handy.

The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a method of ‘on

demand delivery of IT resources via the internet.’

This essentially means that you no longer have to buy

machines to expand your server

Amazon’s already present humongous server system will do

the job for you via the cloud.

The reason why AWS and the EC2 is great news for

businesses looking to expand is primarily the

Auto Scaling feature.

Auto Scaling

ElasticityIncrease in

Reliability

Return on

Investment

Features That Aid Expansion

Auto Scaling

Suppose that your website gets its maximum traffic

during a particular hour in a day, or the activity peaks at

certain days in a month.

Naturally, the compute power required to deal that is

higher, and if you had a physical server space, dedicated

machines would have to be reserved for it.

The EC2 has the facility of letting you change the number

of virtual machines you have running at peak time to

handle that traffic more effectively.

The EC2 can do this automatically, and that is the reason

that it seems like a godsend for scaling.

Return

On Investment

The EC2 has a strict pay for what you use policy.

There is no minimum commitment, and you can minimize

and expand your storage capacity and compute power as

you wish.

If you expand your website, you can choose to upgrade your

server configurations accordingly.

This allows for minimum gap between the demand and

supply curve.

Elasticity

The EC2 does not force you into a corner with respect to

development environment or Operating System, as you

would be if you had purchased that machine for your

physical server space.

Say, you have chosen 4 small machines with Linux, and

you find that 1 larger machine with Ubuntu is preferable

for your application or website.

With the EC2, you can then easily collapse the 4 small

machines into a large one and change the OS and

environment with a click.

They have various different CPU, memory disk and profile

configurations available, and full control is given to the

customer.

Increase In Reliability

Amazon Web Service servers are located in 11 regions and

28 availability zones, so your remote servers are spread out

across the globe.

This is beneficial if you want to physically expand your

business to a different continent, and are looking for faster

ping rate.

Also, EC2’s Elastic Load Balancer will distribute the load to

various availability zones in different geographic locations

so that there is never one single point of failure.

Their security systems are also flexible, and the customer

can choose to dial it up or down. This avoids downtime

and ensures reliability.

While earlier the question was one of investment and

infrastructure, it has now shifted to best return on

investment.

The ability of the EC2 to scale automatically, the

complete flexibility given to the user to change not only

their server configurations and capacity, but also the

security increases the reliability and minimizes

overheads in billing.

Read more on Amazon Web Services:

1. Know Why Amazon Web Services Cloud Platform Is Still Leading The Market?

3. How Does Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Work?

2. Amazon Web Services: Next Generation Of Cloud Computing

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