Amazon Web Services For Dummies

Chapter 13

Ten Reasons to Use Amazon Web Services

There are many users of AWS who struggle to describe why they adopted it. Still others are interested in AWS, but aren’t sure about exactly what it is. And others who know what it is, and why they adopted it, but get tongue-tied when asked to justify their decision by higher management. To solve all those problems in one fell swoop, here is a list of the ten best reasons to use AWS.

AWS Provides IT Agility

IT has a reputation as the “Department of No.” Though it’s true that some IT organizations seem to revel in a Dilbert-like obstinacy, where innumerable and inexplicable roadblocks are placed in the way of anyone seeking access to the wizardry of “infrastructure,” others are frustrated by the sheer complexity of coordinating many different resources, each with its own interface and configuration rules, all of which must be successfully stitched together to provide access to computing resources. Most of these multidepartment, manual, time-consuming efforts are the result of the years-long build-up of established processes executed in serial fashion, resulting in IT provisioning cycles that commonly require weeks to months to deliver computing resources. The result of all this: It’s slower than molasses and widely despised.

Amazon, as is its wont, rethought the provisioning process as though it were being designed from scratch and implemented it as an integrated and automated service. Because every part of the infrastructure is ...