The Amazon EC2 web service was launched in 2006. Over the last decade Amazon has invested heavily in its Web Services (AWS), of which EC2 is a part.
This investment has resulted in a highly capable, scalable Cloud platform that stands out from its competitors for its ease to develop applications. As a further result, Amazon has grown to be larger than it’s main Cloud competitors, combined!
As Cloud computing develops, it is moving beyond its initial hype of being a solution to business IT infrastructure problems and is beginning to mature. As it continues to grow, it is beginning to deliver on the promises made right at the start.
The Cloud is vast and covers many areas of business including infrastructure, software and platform as a service.
The public Cloud offers two compelling advantages: increased ROI and unprecedented, on-the-fly scalability.
Consequently, Cloud-based services, such as Amazon EC2, can help small businesses dramatically reduce their software and other computing costs.
In fact, the adoption of Amazon EC2 is much stronger among smaller companies created in the last few years than older more established companies, because they have no legacy applications and can immediately benefit from the Cloud’s advantages – such as scaling and the elimination of capital expenses.
For many businesses, being able to scale up or down is vital. IT infrastructure is expensive and the Cloud solution allows businesses to scale up specifically for a project or piece of work and gives the ability to then scale back down.
This creates an extra efficiency, especially for development and technology companies. If a new, large project comes in where larger servers or multiple servers are needed, the Cloud allows the business to scale up for the project, whereas in the past, some businesses would have had to consider turning down the project because the infrastructure wasn’t there to support it.
This in turn can give an increase on ROI. Work can be completed faster but to the same or a better standard without having to invest heavily in new hardware. The scalability of the Cloud creates flexibility and the ability to work above the usual capacity.
Ironically, however, on-the-fly scalability also causes problems, because scaling can run in either direction – meaning that you can use more Cloud servers than you actually need at the expense of ROI.
Development teams, as an example, tend to over-provision for a worst case scenario; with unprecedented scalability at their fingertips, it’s easy for dev teams to spin up a virtual server (i.e. processing power, RAM, storage etc.) as often as they like, but then leave those on-demand instances running far longer than necessary (rarely utilizing over 9% in some reported cases).
To help reduce Cloud costs, there are literally hundreds of companies listed on the AWS Partner Network that offer a wide range of products and services for the AWS platform. These include requirements assessment, Cloud migration services, application development, managed services, systems integration and so on.
Although, one thing that has generally been missed is something that helps to control scalability and ensure that it brings benefits and doesn’t damage the business.
A tool, that simply recognises when a server isn’t being used and turns it off. A tool that allows users to turn the server on and off as they need (‘on-demand’). A tool that gives control over the server and assures that the scalability of the Cloud is a benefit and not an extra cost.
There are options to use scheduling so Cloud servers turn on and off at certain times, and this is a great feature… if your server is only on between 9 and 5, give or take half an hour each way. But that’s not always the case. It’s common in business to have people start earlier or finish later, or maybe there is a period in the middle of the day where the servers aren’t used.
Cloud Machine Manager addresses these issues by giving the user control of the server. It gives remote control to Amazon EC2 servers so that developers or project managers can turn the servers on as they’re needed.
If a developer decides to come in early, they can turn the server on whilst they make a cup of coffee and then get going. As you only get charged for the time the server is on, it increases efficiency and means scaling up or down for different projects can increase ROI.
Get a free trial of Cloud Machine Manager!
Working as a Finance Director (FD) for a company where technology is at the core of what they do is a difficult job. It involves grappling over small buying decisions, whereas one department is requesting this and another is requesting that.
