Understanding AWS Cloud Principles and Key CharacteristicsUnderstanding AWS Cloud Principles and Key Characteristics
Depending on who you ask, some estimates peg the global cloud computing market at around USD 445 billion in 2021, growing to about USD 950 billion by 2026. This implies a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of around 17% for the period.There are multiple reasons why the cloud market is growing so fast. Some of them are listed here:
Let’s look at the most important one first.
Elasticity may be one of the most important reasons for the cloud’s popularity. Let’s first understand what it is.Do you remember the feeling of going to a toy store as a kid? There is no feeling like it in the world. Puzzles, action figures, games, and toy cars are all at your fingertips, ready for you to play with them. There was only one problem: you could not take the toys out of the store. Your mom or dad always told you that you could only buy one toy. You always had to decide which one you wanted, and invariably, after one of two weeks of playing with that toy, you got bored with it, and the toy ended up in a corner collecting dust, and you have left longing for the toy you didn’t choose.What if I told you about a special, almost magical, toy store where you could rent toys for as long or as little as you wanted, and the second you got tired with the toy, you could return it, change it for another toy, and stop any rental charges for the first toy? Would you be interested?The difference between the first traditional store and the second magical store is what differentiates on-premises environments and cloud environments.The first toy store is like setting up infrastructure in your own premises. Once you purchase a piece of hardware, you are committed to it and will have to use it until you decommission it or sell it at a fraction of what you paid for it.The second toy store is analogous to a cloud environment. If you make a mistake and provision a resource that’s too small or too big for your needs, you can transfer your data to a new instance, shut down the old instance, and, importantly, stop paying for that instance.More formally defined, elasticity is the ability of a computing environment to adapt to changes in workload by automatically provisioning or shutting down computing resources to match the capacity needed by the current workload.In AWS and the main cloud providers, resources can be shut down without having to terminate them completely, and the billing for resources will stop if the resources are shut down.This distinction cannot be emphasized enough. Computing costs in a cloud environment on a per-unit basis may even be higher than on-premises prices, but the ability to shut resources down and stop getting charged for them makes cloud architectures cheaper in the long run, often in a quite significant way. The only time absolute on-premises costs may be lower than cloud costs is when workloads are extremely predictable and consistent. Let’s look at exactly what this means by reviewing a few examples.