The Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud model has transformed the way cloud computing and storage infrastructure services are attained and administered. Because of this, most of the organizations have migrated their legacy on-premise processes and applications to the public cloud, avoiding the costs and effort that goes into tasks like backup, archiving and so on. In this space, there are many evolved cloud service providers like AWS, Microsoft, Google, IBM, Alibaba, and Fujitsu. Compared to other players, let’s analyze what makes Amazon Web Services (AWS) the front runner for IaaS cloud services.
What Services can an IaaS Cloud User Expect?
- Service Functionality
- Enterprise and Hybrid Workload Support
- Support for DevOps
- Cloud Service Availability
- Compliance
- Data Protection
- Cybersecurity
Why AWS is Best Suited for IaaS Cloud Model
AWS has clients in close to 190 countries and has 66 availability Zones within 21 geographic regions and the company plans to add 12 more. As a provider of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (AWS EC2) facilitates extremely secure, cost-effective, flexible, and scalable cloud infrastructure and computing capacity. As an IaaS enabler, AWS makes it easier for cloud developers to auto-scale resources and also makes web-scale cloud computing easier. The web service interface allows businesses to gain full configurability in resource utilization and computing capacities.
The developers are given full control of the instances and can manage instances anywhere in the software stack, either to halt or reboot using web APIs at any given point of time while preserving the data. Amazon EC2 provides easy-to-develop tools and applications. Above all, businesses will be charged only for the time resources are utilized, thereby saving costs.
AWS offers networking services for the cloud through a virtual private cloud for networking and uses web APIs that offer on-premise connectivity. AWS Elasticsearch is used to handle load balancing during zero downtime or at the times of operational overheads. Users can deploy cluster clouds with ease and source data from another source using inbuilt APIs of Elasticsesarch. Through this service, AWS streamlines all the IaaS cloud operations management tasks such as hardware or software facilitation.
To ensure availability of instances and data consistency across all the availability zones in the regions, Elasticsearch uses the Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployments to replicate the data between various availability zones within a region. The Amazon Elasticsearch Service is designed to be highly available using multi-AZ deployments, which replicates data between multiple Availability Zones in the same region. The service also supervises the state of various cloud clusters and replaces the failed instances automatically.
Security is one of the biggest concerns’ businesses have when migrating to cloud applications. Not only does AWS provide low-cost data centers and robust network architecture, AWS is given the utmost priority to security by offering full stack cloud security solutions through Amazon Cognito to ensure secure and authenticated access to data and resources across any device or platform. To ensure secure transacting of data between various cloud resources, AWS KMS provides a centralized and managed approach to easily create and control the keys used to encrypt data. By using APIs users can easily build applications incorporating AWS Encryption SDK with AWS KMS.
To ensure secure access to resources, AWS offers Identity and Access Management (IAM). This allows users to define users, roles, and groups and provide identity and access permissions. As an added layer of authentication, Multi-Factor Authentication can be enabled for individual users and can apply to AWS service APIs.
Preparation Prior to Adopting IaaS Platform
For successful adoption of IaaS platform, IDC suggests the following steps:
- Define and align high-level goals for cloud strategy
- Design cloud architecture
- Implement strategy
- Implement ongoing operations, management, and review of the new multi-cloud environment
- Govern the cloud transition strategy and frame of the new IT strategy
