AWS Customer’s Case Study
Task description:-
Read at least one case study or stories of companies that got benefitted from AWS according to your interest field and then create a blog/article of the same.
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing also referred to as “the cloud”, is the delivery of on-demand computing resources — everything from application to the data centres — over the internet on a pay for use basics.
NIST (National Institute of Standard & Technology, US) defines cloud computing as a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can rapidly be provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.
Example of computing resources include:
· Networks
· Servers
· Storage
· Applications
· Services
As Cloud model composed of –
5 — Essential Characteristics
4 — Deployment Models
3 — Service Models
Essentials Characteristics of Cloud Model are:
1. On-demand self-service:
Cloud computing resources can be provisioned without human interaction from the service provider. In other words, a manufacturing organization can provide additional computing resources as needed without going through the cloud service provider. This can be a storage space, virtual machine instances, database instances, and so on.
2. Broad Network Access:
Cloud computing resources are available over the network and can be accessed by diverse customer platforms. It other words, cloud services are available over a network — ideally high broadband communication link — such as the internet, or in the case of a private cloud it could be a local area network (LAN).
3. Resource Pooling:
Resource pooling means that multiple customers are serviced from the same physical resources. Providers’ resource pool should be very large and flexible enough to service multiple client requirements and to provide for the economy of scale. When it comes to resource pooling, resource allocation must not impact the performances of critical manufacturing applications.
4. Rapid Elasticity:
In this, we can access more resources when we need them and scale back when we don’t because resources are elastically provisioned and released.
5. Measured Service:
Cloud computing resources usage is metered and manufacturing organizations pay accordingly for what they have used. Resource utilization can be optimized by leveraging charge-per-use capabilities.
The cost model is based on “pay for what you use” — the payment is variable based on the actual consumption by the manufacturing organization.
Types of Cloud Deployment Models:
1. Public Cloud:
Leverages cloud services over the open internet on hardware owned by the cloud providers, but its usage is shared by other companies.
2. Private Cloud:
Infrastructure is provided for exclusive use by a single organization. It could run on-premises or it could be owned, managed, and operated by the service provider.
3. Hybrid Cloud:
It is a mixture of both Public and Private clouds, working together seamlessly.
4. Community Cloud:
A community cloud in computing is a collaborative effort in which infrastructure is shared between several organizations from a specific community with common concerns, whether managed internally or by a third-party and hosted internally or externally.
Types of Service Models:
1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS):
Infrastructure as a Service, sometimes abbreviated as IaaS, contains the basic building blocks for cloud IT and typically provide access to networking features, computers (virtual or on dedicated hardware), and data storage space. Infrastructure as a Service provides you with the highest level of flexibility and management control over your IT resources and is most similar to existing IT resources that many IT departments and developers are familiar with today.
2. Platform as a Service (PaaS):
Platforms as a service remove the need for organizations to manage the underlying infrastructure (usually hardware and operating systems) and allow you to focus on the deployment and management of your applications. This helps you be more efficient as you don’t need to worry about resource procurement, capacity planning, software maintenance, patching, or any of the other undifferentiated heavy lifting involved in running your application.
3. Software as a Service (SaaS):
Software as a Service provides you with a completed product that is run and managed by the service provider. In most cases, people referring to Software as a Service are referring to end-user applications. With a SaaS offering, you do not have to think about how the service is maintained or how the underlying infrastructure is managed; you only need to think about how you will use that particular piece of software. A common example of a SaaS application is a web-based email where you can send and receive email without having to manage feature additions to the email product or maintaining the servers and operating systems that the email program is running on.
Reasons to choose AWS cloud over other cloud platforms:
As we know, Amazon Web Services (abbreviated AWS) is a collection of remote computing services (also called web services) that together make up a cloud computing platform, offered over the Internet by Amazon.com. The most central and well-known of these services are Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3.
I’ve compiled a few of our reasons for choosing AWS and explained them here. So, let’s dive in and see why AWS is better than the competition, for big and small users.
Ø On the Go Pricing:
Amazon took a refreshing approach to price it's hosting when launching AWS. Every service is “a la carte”, meaning you pay for what you use. This makes a lot of sense for server infrastructure, as traffic tends to be very busty, especially the larger the site is.
Ø The Free Tier:
The free tier, which provides enough credit to run an EC2 micro instance 24/7 all month, resolves this. It comes with S3 storage, EC2 compute hours, Elastic Load Balancer time, and much more. This gives developers a chance to try out AWS’s API in their software, which not only enhances their software but also ties them to AWS, which benefits Amazon in the long run.
Ø Performance:
There’s no denying the speed of AWS. The Elastic Block Storage is nearly as fast as S3 but provides different features. EC2 Compute Units give Xeon-class performance at an hourly rate. The reliability is better than most private data centres in the world.
The distributed nature of EBS and S3 yields millions of input/output operations per second to all instances. And, we have a storage system that is capable of vast scaling, with the reliability of 99.999999999%.
Ø Deployment Speed:
AWS shrinks that deployment time to minutes. If you utilize their Amazon Machine Images, you can have a machine deployed and ready to accept connections in that short amount of time.
The CloudFormation Templates is a gift from the AWS which can be used to roll out multiple environments at the click of a button and as well can be rolled down at the click of a button when the requirement recedes.
Ø Security:
Access to the AWS resources can be restricted using the IAM (Identity and Access Management), using the roles in IAM we can define the privileges for user actions which greatly reduces any malpractices.
AWS also provides VPC, which can be used to host our services on a private network that is not accessible from the internet but can communicate with the resources in the same network. This restricts access to the resources such that any ill-intentioned user from the internet.
These resources hosted in the private network can be accessed using the Amazon VPN or some open-source service like OpenVPN.
Ø Flexibility:
The most important feature of AWS is its flexibility. All the services work and communicate together with your application to automatically judge demand and handle it accordingly.
Now come to the point after these benefits provided by AWS at an optimum cost, there are lots of technical and non-technical organisations that are part of AWS as customers in the world.
Among all the customers worldwide, one of the prestigious organisation also gets benefitted from AWS Cloud Computing resources, and the name of that organisation is Apple Inc.
Now, discuss how Apple Inc gets benefitted after using AWS Cloud resources in detail.
Introduction of Apple Inc.
As we all know, Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, that designs, develops, and sells consumer electronics, computer software, and online services. It is considered one of the Big Five companies in the U.S. information technology industry, along with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook.
It’s hardware products include the iPhone smartphone, the iPad tablet computer, the Mac personal computer, the iPod portable media player, the Apple Watch smartwatch, etc.
Apple’s software includes iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS operating systems, the iTunes media player, the Safari web browser, the Shazam music identifier, and the iLife and iWork creativity and productivity suites, as well as professional applications.
How Apple Inc. uses AWS Cloud Services:
As we know, Apple’s ecosystem is massive. Approximately a billion people are using more than 1.4 billion Apple devices. Even as iPhone sales decline, Apple is bringing tens of millions of new people into its ecosystem each year. However, we are getting to a point where it is prudent to begin thinking about what user growth actually means to Apple.
Apple is far from the only company to run parts of its cloud on Amazon servers.
Apple’s future beyond the iPhone increasingly involves software services, ranging from Apple Music and iCloud to its new TV Plus video offering and its News Plus magazine subscription. Yet a big factor in helping those cloud-based services operate across its nearly 1.5 billion active devices simultaneously is the company’s ongoing contract with Amazon, specifically Amazon’s cloud computing division.
According to CNBC, Apple is one of Amazon Web Services’ biggest customers, with monthly payments to the cloud division totalling more than $30 million and increasing.
As per CNBC report, an expenditure of more than $360 million a year means Apple is deeply reliant on AWS to operate core parts of its business, even though doing so means working with a soon-to-be-rival in online video and a current competitor in areas like artificial intelligence, streaming music, and smart home products.
APPLE IS ONE OF AMAZON’S BIGGEST COMPETITORS AND ONE OF AWS’S BIGGEST CUSTOMERS
Some other special key points are:
· Apple has a major multiyear agreement with Amazon Web Services.
· Apple spends more on Amazon’s cloud than up-and-comers like Lyft and Pinterest.
· However, Apple is also investing heavily in building its own cloud infrastructure.
Apple explains its security policy in terms of using a public cloud, rather than its own data centre. The data is stored onto the object storage after encryption, data sliced, and further, it adds that the data was being stored anonymously, so that the secret, as well as the data, could stay buttoned up. The data is encrypted, chopped into parts, and is sent to different storage locations like S3(AWS), storage (GCP), blob (Azure). Apple pays around $360 million per year to Amazon for using S3.
