There are two major types of services for the purpose of this article. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) refers to the traditional infrastructure such as VMs and storage. VMware has helped to push popularity of IaaS and has been around for quite some time. Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a more recent development but still been around long enough for a track record, depending on the vendor you choose to supply this. PaaS makes it much easier for developers to consume various services without the infrastructure to support it such as servers, VMs, switches, etc. You may be asking yourself, this is all great but what scenarios might AWS not work for me. There are typically a few of these. Your security policies may not allow corporate IP (Intellectual Property) or data in a public cloud offering. AWS is fairly secure and PCI and HIPAA compliant but your security officer may still have concerns. Other reasons may be if you have a fairly static IT footprint, purchasing equipment for your premise or datacenter colocation space and housing there may save money over the long run. If you need guaranteed resources such as a guaranteed disk performance, AWS may not be for you. A dedicated private cloud solution may be the way to go. In Summary, AWS is a great place for new businesses that are not sure of their growth or even very mature businesses that need a large infrastructure to be able to scale up and down as their usage needs scale. Many uses cases can be made for using AWS, some can be made for not using it but as with any solution, vetting your business case against the solution will determine what is right for your organization.
