Amazon Web Services - Introduction, Benefits and Examples

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Amazon's cloud computing platform that provides a range of web services that can scale and is mostly on a pay-per-use model. 

Benefits

Below are some of the benefits of AWS:

1. AWS provides out-of-the-box support for common needs such as load balancing, queueing, sending mails, storing files, databases, DNS system etc.

2. Many of the AWS services are by default, fault tolerant and/or highly available.

3. You can automate almost everything that you do within AWS, with the help of AWS provided APIs.

4. AWS help you avoid long-term capacity planning by allowing you to scale up or scale down on demand.

5. AWS complies with many professional standards such as ISO-27001, HIPAA, FedRAMP and CoD CSM, PCI DSS Level 1, ISO-9001 etc.

6. AWS (cloud in general) follows a pay-per-use strategy; hence no need to acquire software or hardware upfront.

7. Minimum initial investment on infrastructure requirements.

8. AWS provides good graphical interface (console) and command line utility for better managing the services.

Example Use Cases

Below are some of the example use cases for AWS:

1. Use maintenance free services for databases, DNS system etc. thus reducing operational costs.

2. May use multiple smaller virtual servers instead of one big on-premise system at similar cost, thus providing better availability.

3. May connect on-premise data center to a private network on the cloud through Virtual Private Network (VPN) to move parts of business to AWS, but still controlling access to the data with access-control lists.

4. Launch multiple servers in different data centers and use a load balancer, to achieve fault tolerance.

5. May split dynamic and static content for websites and deliver static content over a CDN for improved performance.

6. Startups can get started with minimal initial infrastructure requirements.

7. Proof of concepts, can be done on production quality infrastructure without much cost or time.

8. Store data in different types of servers with varying prices based on access speed requirements; for instance, some data may be required real time, whereas archival data can take some time for retrieval.