Business Boost by AWS

Hello and Welcome, Nowadays there are many companies which are coming with cloud services and are performing better day by day. These Cloud Service Providers, are providing: SaaS, PaaS, IaaS. So, let’s start exploring the big names of Cloud Service Providers in the world.

There are many major Cloud Service providers in the market:

1. Amazon Web Service (AWS)
2. Microsoft Azure
3. Google Cloud Platform
4. IBM Cloud Services

and many other minors struggling and trying to compete, like — Adobe Creative Cloud,Kamatera,VMware,Rackspace,Red Hat,Salesforce,Oracle Cloud,SAP,Verizon Cloud,Navisite,Dropbox.

Here we will be discussing on how the most dominant and most successful among all has helped many companies boost their business by the use of all. And when we say most successful cloud provider then it is none other than AWS. So let’s move forward and know a little about ASW first.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

AWS is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 175 fully featured services from data centers globally. Millions of customers — including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies — are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster. (Source — https://aws.amazon.com/what-is-aws/)

Amazon Web Services is a cloud computing platform which provides services such as compute power, database storage, content delivery and many other functions which will help to integrate a business. The Amazon Web Services is flexible, scalable, and reliable and due to this many companies are implementing it in their work. There is no upfront cost and the customer has to pay only for what they have used. It is one of the leading cloud service providers among all.

With the help of the internet, the customer can access highly durable storage such as Amazon Glacier, Amazon S3, and Amazon EBS. It also has a high-performance database such as Amazon Redshift, Amazon Dynamo DB, Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon RDS.

Cloud Computing is helping a lot in business whether it is a small or large. These Cloud Service Providers companies provide storage database server networking and the software through which the business can increase.

Cloud computing isn’t right for every company, but an increasing number of enterprises realize that it helps them grow their businesses and meet other goals.

The Big Spenders

Clearly, AWS is the cloud computing platform of choice for businesses across a range of industries. But who are the biggest, and how much money are they spending on these services?

According to Intricately, the top ten AWS users based on EC2 monthly spend are:

1. Netflix: $19 million
2. Twitch: $15 million
3. LinkedIn: $13 million
4. Facebook: $11 million
5. Turner Broadcasting: $10 million
6. BBC: $9 million
7. Baidu: $9 million
8. ESPN: $8 million
9. Adobe: $8 million
10. Twitter: $7 million

Here are few examples of large companies that found cloud computing success. Let’s have a closer look at some of AWS’s biggest clients:

Unilever

Unilever North America, the U.S. branch of the venerable global-scale manufacturer of food, household, and other consumer products, found that its time-to-market (crucial in the consumer goods industry) was being held back by the lack of standardised technology among its on-premises IT facilities and websites.

Unilever conducted an exhaustive review of the available cloud-based options, and finally chose to migrate to AWS, using a full range of AWS services to support 1,700 digital marketing web properties on a worldwide basis.

For Unilever, the advantages include increased speed of rollout for a website (now two days, rather than the pre-AWS average of two weeks), and the increased speed at which changes to a site or a marketing campaign can be made. Unilever also uses AWS for comprehensive backup and disaster recovery, and for rapid deployment of standardised infrastructure.

GE Oil & Gas

The oil and gas division of General Electric has migrated 350+ applications to AWS, cutting the average cost of ownership by over 50%, according to their own estimate. For GE, the migration process is ongoing, with constant review of on-premises applications and services to see which ones are the best candidates for transfer to the cloud.

The ability to monitor the use of cloud-based applications is important to GE’s IT team, since it allows them to accurately gauge expenses and savings, to determine when services should be active (and thus billable), and when they should be turned off.

AWS’ capacity for handling large amounts of data is important to GE as well. The oil and gas division needs to be able to process enormous volumes of mission-critical automated pipeline inspection data. It is using AWS technology to store and transport the data, and for data analysis and processing, saving time and improving the quality of the results.

Kellogg’s

The Kellogg Company, or Kellogg’s, a familiar breakfast-table name, is a company with a long history (founded in 1888), with worldwide operations. For Kellogg’s (as is the case throughout the breakfast-cereal industry), product promotions are all-important.

The Kellogg company had been relying on an on-premises database for modelling marketing campaigns and analysing promotion and sales data, but the system, which could run no more than a single simulation per day, was no longer able to keep up with the company’s needs.

As a replacement, Kellogg’s chose a SAP promotion planning and simulation application. At the same time, they chose to run the SAP application on AWS, rather than on-premises. The decision to go with AWS was motivated by a number of factors, including speed and overall capacity. (The system handles 16 TB of weekly sales data, with several dozen marketing simulations on a weekly basis.) AWS also offered high availability, reduced cost, and flexibility in IT planning. The combination of SAP and AWS (with its support for SAP software) has given Kellogg’s a significant advantage in a very competitive market.

Shell

Like many other large businesses operating on a global scale, energy giant Shell has taken steps to protect itself from the rising threat of cyber attacks. In particular, the Netherlands-headquartered firm decided to look at ways it could improve its security information and event management solution.

To stay ahead of cyber criminals, Shell required the ability to run detailed analysis of trends over time and continually spot vulnerabilities through a cyberthreat hunting function. The challenge? Its SIEM solution just didn’t have the capacity to perform these critical functionalities.

Using around 100 EC2 instances and Splunk Enterprise Security applications, the firm has implemented a much more powerful cyber security solution for analysing real-time and historical data. This means Shell can protect itself from current and emerging cyber threats. According to Shell CyberDefence manager Oskar Brink, the firm is “finding more than twice as many events that could have resulted in security incidents and breaches”.

Expedia

As cloud and mobile technologies continue to dominate the business landscape, lots of firms are moving away from physical data centres in search for more sustainable and efficient alternatives.

Travel comparison website Expedia is an excellent example, having unveiled plans to move 80% of mission-critical applications to the cloud through AWS. The firm decided to do this after discovering that the main reason for people leaving its website was due to error pages. Expedia wanted customers to get around its websites quickly and without running into any issues.

Using a range of AWS solutions, Expedia claims that it has become more resilient, has the ability to develop new applications faster and can save millions in the process. Magesh Chandramouli, Principal Architect, said: “By using AWS, I’m not bound by throughput limitations or CPU capacity. When I think of AWS, freedom is the first word that comes to mind”.

Airbnb

It’s not just long established companies using AWS to run their compute estate. Airbnb, a community rental marketplace for property owners and travellers, lists more than 7 million accommodations and is a long-time user of AWS.

Catering for millions of customers globally, the firm has continued to invest in AWS solutions as it has grown rapidly in the past few years. Currently, it has 200 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances to manage its core application, memcache and search servers; Elastic Load Balancing for handling incoming traffic between these servers; Amazon Elastic MapReduce for processing and disseminating data; Amazon Simple Storage Service for backups and static files; and Amazon CloudWatch.

Since implementing these solutions, Airbnb takes the view that it’s better equipped for future growth and can save money across its operations. Tobi Knaup, an engineer at Airbnb, said: “Because of AWS, there has always been an easy answer (in terms of time required and cost) to scale our site.”

Apple

When it comes to any aspect of its business, Apple is pretty secretive. But according to a 2019 report by CNBC, it happens to be one of the biggest spenders on AWS services. People familiar with the setup told the American broadcaster that the Cupertino-based firm spends over $30 million per month on Amazon cloud computing services.

The iPhone maker hasn’t confirmed these claims, but with growing demand for internet services such as iCloud and Apple Music, it makes sense that the firm would need a comprehensive cloud solution. CNBC points out that Apple has worked with other cloud providers, including Google and Microsoft, in the past.