In good old days every party connected to the internet and wishing to distribute data had to have own servers. This could lead to massive over budgeting and prevent business from being efficient. Literally, business had to take care of infrastructure, which was most of the time sitting and doing nothing but being extremely expensive. But the goal of every organization is to improve business performance. Then AWS came on stage and offered a quite unique kind of service. Now if business has a big CPU demand, it can be utilised through pay-as-you-go model. AWS will rent it for you and let you get all of your data with paying only fraction of the cost of own infrastructure.
Ways of communication with AWS
So there are several ways to communicate with AWS.
- First one, the easiest one, is through AWS web console. Almost all services are introduced there. To get the idea of what they are, it’s very handy to open any AWS service and start playing. If you are visualizer and do like to see the results of your work instantly. Many things could be done in a few clicks. However, the newest features usually come in CLI (Command Line Interface) interface first.
- Another good and probably very handy way for admins is AWS CLI tool. The pros are you do not have to do plenty of clicks to get to desired point and can see information straight away as Json or as a Table. It is not very presentable as in web console, but still very useful. However, you have to be terminal person and have quite good typing skills or have templates to run favorite commands. It is extremely good when you access to SSH and server is allowed to see some data through VPC. Also with CLI tool it is very handy to write BASH/BAT scripts for automation of particular operations like starting/stopping EC2 instances at particular times etc.
- Next one is AWS API provided by several programming languages. It has explicit documentation explaining all aspects and possible error codes or Exceptions. This API gives you flexibility such as you can write standalone AWS managing app or embed AWS parts into your existing application to give you more power and performance out of your AWS infrastructure.
Some things to be aware of
Interesting thing above is that every type of communication with AWS are almost similar in structure of request/response. Once you get how to work with one of it, it’s very easy to jump to another without much reading, it’s clear what is going on. Indeed, we strongly DO NOT recommend to work with anything without reading documentation carefully. Often, when people fall in a trap with using some services without knowing about their price. Month bill could be not pleasant surprise though. There are some tools to monitor and have an alert when spending are reaching particular level. The best practice is to set up in advance. Good news is: most of the AWS services have some free usage tier and you can try them out for absolutely free.
So now you are ready to begin thinking of how to improve business performance and processes with help of AWS and make more profit out of your existing business.
If you need audit or consultation about how to put your business on AWS hyper rails get in touch.