As we look ahead to a new year, businesses are getting ready for greater digital transformation. Compared to previous years, the past 12 months have seen radical technological developments that have dramatically reshaped global business operations. Altogether the rapid proliferation of reliable, accessible artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) products demonstrated new digital transformation benefits. Nevertheless many businesses are not ready to take the leap into this space though they’d win massively with technological investments.
So what do businesses do to start on the path of digital transformation and bring their operations online in 2024? One key step is a cloud hosting migration with a leading public cloud provider. Concurrently businesses need to prepare a growth strategy that maximizes their cloud computing solution investment.
This A3logics article will unpack how businesses can invest in the number one public cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS). Then we’ll explain how they economically scale their AWS cloud hosting services so they’re deriving value and performance over time.
Let’s get to the article so businesses can make the most of AWS in 2024 and beyond.
To begin with, we’ll review the key facts businesses should know about AWS — the world’s most-used cloud hosting services.
Since late 2004, Amazon has offered public cloud computing solutions to enterprise customers all over the world. Prior to this launch, AWS ideation was underway for many years based on their “as-a-service” products already available. For example, their e-commerce-as-a-Service platform offerings proved their their business-to-business-to-customer (B2B2C) nous.
Following the initial AWS cloud hosting services deployment, their platforms have continually advanced. Felix Richter’s Statista analysis attests, “Having established itself as an early leader in the market for cloud infrastructure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the online retailer’s profitable cloud platform, is still ahead of the pack.” Furthermore Richter reports their public cloud market share as 32% at the close of 2022 with millions of enterprise customers.
Despite current reporting showing a 1% year-on-year market share drop, AWS still constitutes over 40% of Amazon’s revenue. Statista attributes this to AWS’ “range of cloud-based products, including databases, analytics, management tools…and developer tools”. Specifically, “The company continuously expands its repertoire of services to meet its customers’ changing needs and thereby advances industry standards and practices.” Correspondingly we can confidently estimate that businesses can strategically invest in AWS based on their needs following a tactical blueprint.
In addition to these features, the AWS distributed, on-demand IT structure enables handling of multiple different enterprise activities. Because AWS is a hyperscale cloud provider, they can deliver on their value proposition through specialist products for dynamic operations.
All of these products are designed for scaling. Even so maximizing the range according to business needs and strategic objectives might be tricky. This is why economic scaling requires both clear product understanding and cloud solutions expert input.
As shown above, AWS enterprise customers can better retain return on investment (ROI) through cloud hosting services product scaling understanding. Hence in this next section we’ll unpack navigation principles for tactically approaching AWS.
Though AWS is designed to be scaled costs can quickly blow out. What’s more, not every product is necessary for businesses to achieve their operational goals and needs. For instance, there are products like Blockchain for ledger database requirements whereas a logistics company will likely use Supply Chain.
Once this is reviewed against what AWS enterprise customers need in the short-term and long-term, planning clearly matters. In fact this means understanding what products are needed when they’re beginning with AWS, their objectives, and their budget. When these three key areas are evaluated and analyzed, businesses can see that all AWS products have contextual value. Even so, they don’t need to invest in every product for use or to be in a position to scale.
Maximizing scalability takes what the AWS products can do and evaluates business needs against a cloud services roadmap strategy. Gartner explains, “A true cloud strategy is business-driven, focused on “what” and “why” issues and alignment to business goals.” So what’s crucial is getting the most out of the AWS cloud hosting services at every stage of organizational use.
In essence this is why AWS encourages their enterprise customers to leverage the cloud architecture and its products for success. Emphatically, they encourage customers to adopt a “well-architected framework”. Because “Successful, growing, systems often see an increase in demand over time,” enterprise cloud hosting needs to meet operational changes. Subsequently AWS has the outlook that, “A system that is scalable can adapt to meet this new level of demand.”
It’s important to note here that these are non-negotiable steps for AWS enterprise customers. Despite this, businesses should be prepared for an in-depth process for effective cloud use and profitable, qualitative ROI.
Before delving into these strategies for businesses preparing for AWS cloud hosting services and scaling, we’ll note AWS best practice. Specifically this AWS best practice is for “well-architected” for both applications and workloads. They explain, “Built around six pillars—operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability—AWS Well-Architected provides a consistent approach for customers and partners to evaluate architectures and implement scalable designs.”
Prospective and existing AWS enterprise customers should know that they encourage the following six pillars for well-architected cloud systems. Not only do these pillars create consistency for existing customers and AWS partners but also these maintain cloud best practice.
Firstly, businesses benefit from planning their scaling according to needs. Hence if there are products that don’t currently suit their roadmap strategy then they shouldn’t be using them. This applies to solutions, like E-Commerce that many businesses may use yet might be entirely unnecessary for Human Resources. Equally this means having a progressive planned understanding of products and solutions for the future. Accordingly this is where AWS Auto Scaling can be used for dynamic scaling to optimize performance, costs, or balancing both.
Secondly, there are AWS products that businesses will quite simply never need. For example, the Games and Media Services product ranges may not be used at any point in Healthcare organizations. Nevertheless having a comprehensive grasp of product functions and features helps gain clarity. This is where the three-part understanding of business needs, strategic roadmapping, and cloud solutions consultation services is crucially beneficial.
Thirdly, businesses need to approach their end-to-end AWS migration as economically as possible from day one. Moreover building realistic budget limitations into the AWS solution purchasing will contribute to cost-effectiveness. Many experts indicate that businesses need to think about this as part of their roadmap strategy.
Fourthly, though this strategy is arguably a cost-effectiveness plan subset, there are two reasons why we’re separately addressing this. On the one hand, AWS business customers need to consider their budget prior to having cost optimization data. On the other hand, AWS offers specific cost optimization tools like AWS Cost Explorer. In detail, this product interface gives data including costs and usage over time. With this product enabled businesses are positioned to make informed decisions, build custom applications, granular filtering, and forecast. Both these reasons have an important place in the course of AWS customer journeys.
Now that we’ve reviewed tactics and AWS recommendations for navigating their products range, we’ll review five products for effective scaling. Hence businesses, especially SMEs, can see how these products contribute to profitable operations and are optimizable for scaling and investment.
The ELB product has the benefit of automatic scaling through distributing incoming application traffic across multiple targets. Thus ELB ensures business applications can handle varying levels of traffic. Because load balancing enables operations across sites, dynamic business needs can be met. Likewise the auto-scaling functions of ELB mean that businesses only use these high-traffic functionalities when it’s required. Chiefly then businesses aren’t compromising load balancing nor are there any ongoing costs for functions not in use.
The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) product supports businesses to flexibly adjust to their changing cloud computing demands. In detail this is the addition or removal of compute capacity for the number of Amazon EC2 instances. In the application fleet the response is based on load demand. Following this the AWS managed services enable businesses to maintain performance while optimizing costs. At the same time, businesses define their own scaling policies based on “established or real-time demand patterns”.
The Amazon RDS is a solution for scalable and resizable capacity for a variety of database engines. In reality this simplifies, eases, and positions business systems for their relational databases in the cloud. Additionally businesses can opt to use these databases in both the cloud or on-premises. Subsequently these databases are built for businesses to scale with seven popular engines and they can overcome numerous common problems.
A flagship AWS product, Amazon S3, is a key to unlocking resilient, highly protected object storage services. Not only does their 11 9s of data durability (99.999999999%) facilitate scaling but also it means integrating cutting-edge features. Whether it’s data backup, archival, and analytics, or introducing AI and ML, businesses — and their storage — can grow with S3.
Businesses can kickstart how they run robust, scalable code using AWS Lambda. Since the product enables businesses to run code without managing servers, they can then automatically scale applications. Because scaling is based on the number of requests, businesses utilizing AWS Lambda don’t incur costs when not in use. AWS Lambda handles daily volumes of anything from dozens of code execution requests through to hundreds of thousands per second. Undeniably this means businesses save costs in the short-term while seamlessly scaling using the same systems as workloads increase.
Comparatively, though the AWS product range is a proven force in cloud hosting services, there are offerings not requiring scaling. Given that, it’s important for businesses to understand precisely why these don’t fit into the cost-effective scalability needs assessment.
The go-to AWS performance management tool helps businesses monitor and manage their cloud system resources and applications. Because CloudWatch won’t necessarily need scaling for cloud resources and AWS-run applications, its function suits robust ongoing project management. Despite there being no need to scale, businesses can confidently rely on CloudWatch for stable monitoring of systems across sites.
The highly available and scalable Amazon Route 53 product is critical for domain name system (DNS) management. In fact the product that connects user requests to internet applications running on AWS or on-premises is highly robust. Generally speaking, Amazon Route 53 is efficient irrespective of enterprise size. Despite this, unless organizations need the product to manage an extensive domain network, it’s sufficient in its capabilities without scaling. However AWS customers using this need to ensure that their infrastructure can handle the load and traffic capacity at endpoints.
So businesses minimize lost investment — and maximize profits, productivity, user experience (UX), and scalability — we’ll review key actionable AWS tactics.
Due to the benefits of this billing discount, AWS business customers can scale more cost-effectively and for bottomline efficiency. When businesses utilize reserved instances for services with predictable usage patterns they can gain measurable cost savings. Businesses should note that there is no performance loss as decisions are based on committing to a consistent usage amount.
Because AWS enables businesses to resource allocate according to use, detail-oriented resource monitoring can be used to plan allocations. Hence this guarantees businesses don’t over-provision cloud resources. Thus they’re avoiding unnecessary costs without compromising on cloud functionality and availability.
Similarly to Reserved Instances, this tactic applies to fault-tolerant and flexible applications. In this case, this tactic takes advantage of elasticity in the AWS cloud to withstand potential interruptions at reduced rates. While this is discounted from on-demand AWS prices, it’s an offer that still runs hyperscale workloads significantly more affordably.
So best practice ERP is upheld, businesses can use metadata tags to comprehensively analyze their AWS resources. When a tagging strategy for resources is applied, businesses can then understand and allocate costs to their internal operations. For instance, this data analysis system may identify fluctuating resource needs between departments or projects that require diversified organizational allocations. This ties in with the AWS Well-Architected Framework discussed earlier in this article.
To list, AWS offers cloud customers a range of reporting and cost optimization tools for tracking, reporting, and analyzing costs. These tools review these over time for better system use and organizational ERP. All in all, these options include: AWS Cost Explorer, Budgets, and AWS Trusted Advisor to monitor, optimize, and control spending.
Overall when businesses, especially SMEs, leverage these strategic tactics their cost-efficiency and investment optimization can overlay AWS scaling steps.
In light of this AWS Cloud Hosting Services scaling strategies discussion, we’ll finish this A3logics article with relevant case studies. These three U.S. businesses from diverse industries turned to AWS for their custom cloud solutions that they’ve continually scaled. These case studies demonstrate how these businesses found AWS cloud products suitable for their industries and customer base. Moreover these global U.S. businesses undertook this solution development through hiring cloud solutions AWS Premier Consulting partner services.
Avis Budget Group are a car rental monolith with locations all over the world. Their transport solutions support customers beyond the vehicular journey with “connected devices, modern technology, data, and advanced analytics”. Accordingly this takes Avis Budget Group mobility to the next level and they leverage AWS cloud systems to do this. In particular they worked with an AWS Premier Consulting Partner to build their own cloud environment hosted on AWS. Currently they use a range of AWS technologies including building local computing within vehicles as well as AWS ML optimizations.
Telecommunications giant Verizon are a force in U.S. wireless networks along with all-fibre networks and integrated global solutions. Altogether their needs lie in both security configuration, problem detection, and supporting both internal and external stakeholders. Hence they needed a robust, mature solution for their cloud migration and AWS fit the bill. Accordingly their needs were met through a new custom-built preventative system called the Development-Security-Operations Pipeline (DSOP). Since implementation Verizon is now able to complete their security validation within AWS whether it’s for IoT or automated deployment.
At present sound experience company Sonos are a household name for millions of listeners with their hardware and software innovations. Because they celebrate sound in their customers’ everyday lives, they prize the UX side of their customer service experience (CX). With this in mind, they developed a data-driven AWS Connect and Salesforce CRM that integrates cloud products elevating CX. In order to achieve this they have an omnichannel contact centre solution that streamlines CX while improving service team conditions. What’s more this has achieved a 45% saving in monthly contact center spend without compromising CX or service objectives.
In conclusion AWS is understandably a continuing choice for any company looking for mature public cloud hosting services. Across all key areas — products and services, infrastructure, customizability, AI and ML, and scalability — they retain their innovative edge. Straightaway businesses can be confident that they can use AWS for their digital transformation or to launch a startup.
Despite these robust cloud hosting services, the truth is AWS investment, including scaling planning, is best approached with professional strategization. The combined contributions of expert cloud solutions providers in consultation, configuration, migration, and management power a high-performance AWS system. Businesses can begin the process with an AWS cloud solutions consultation with A3logics expert team to discuss their needs. Then they can take the next step towards building a scalable solution that’s cost-effective and profitable from day one.
The Amazon Web Services (AWS) products are undoubtedly a high-quality, robust, elastic, and highly scalable cloud hosting solution. Since AWS is a system designed for scaling — so businesses can advance using IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, benefits are considerable. For example, businesses can save on costs, achieve progressive outcomes that build their operations, and introduce new products or services.
Overall it’s important to emphasize that every business, irrespective of their industry, should be planning to scale their AWS solutions. In fact this helps gain more value from the systems while also being an opportunity for tactical business growth. Right now there are a range of ways that different industries can be scaling their AWS Cloud Hosting Services. For instance, a retail company may build a new website and introduce app eCommerce that offers omnichannel shopping.
Chiefly businesses can use AWS without hiring cloud solutions professionals such as an AWS Premier Consulting Partner. Furthermore businesses can make use of some AWS products for free for a set period of time.
Despite this, businesses that hire AWS consultants benefit from their expertise, cloud solutions experience, and team qualifications. To gain insights in this area businesses can start with an AWS cloud solutions consultation with the A3logics professional team. During this process they will gain additional insights into AWS Premier Consulting, AWS capabilities, and aligning this with business objectives. Then businesses can make an informed decision around hiring cloud solutions experts for their AWS migration.
All businesses benefit from a roadmap strategy for their software, business systems, and cloud solutions. Irrespective of their needs, an AWS Cloud Hosting Services roadmap strategy will equip businesses to maximize the platform over time. For both the short-term and long-term, they will analyze, evaluate, and ideate how AWS will address needs. Then this strategy is expanded for broader time horizons to align with AWS migration. Over time the roadmap strategy guides progressive, sustained growth including cost-effective strategies for scaling, value propositions, and digital transformation.
