Setting Up Amazon Web Services For Your Start-Up Business

Start-up businesses usually begin their business with a short budget in place. Purchasing servers and other hardware appliances can prove to be a very expensive option for small businesses and there comes the importance of the growing popularity of cloud computing technologies. Other benefits offered by public cloud in addition to the affordable cost include the availability of scalability and flexibility. Infrastructure can be quickly setup for businesses using the public cloud compared to weeks or months that might take to create a physical infrastructure instead.

Amazon Web Services is considered as the best and the most popular cloud-based services today. Let’s take a closer look in to how the Amazon Web Services can be set up for smaller businesses.

Prerequisites

A technical competency as well as an IT background is essential for proper configuration while going ahead with cloud deployment. It has to be understood that Amazon Web Services is a proprietary cloud implementation which means it is not transferrable to the compute engine of Google or Microsoft Azure. Multiple ways are available for implementing a specific solution in Amazon Web Services.

Web Hosting Key Components

Here is a list of key components that can be used for web hosting.

• Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2
• Simple Storage Service or S3
• Elastic Block Store or EBS
• Relationship Database Service or RDS
• Route 53 for DNS and domain name registration

Prebuilt and Optimized Amazon Machine Images

The presence of Amazon Machine Images helps in the easier introduction of the first compute instance which can be loaded in to a newly generated instance. The shared public AMIs can be created and used by the AWS community in addition to the availability of AWS Marketplace for third-party created images. A ‘Region’ or location has to be chosen so as to make it the base of virtual infrastructure before setting up a cloud infrastructure. However businesses will have to ensure the location they select are the nearest to the location where your developers are located. This helps in achieving faster loading times whenever a website is being developed or a data is being uploaded. There might be instances wherein certain new or beta offerings might be available only across specific regions. AWS provides users with tools that enable them to migrate between multiple regions. The rendering of the deployment region moot can be performed with the help of a good Content Delivery Network depending up on the way in which the website is architected.

Preparing for the uptime

Even though AWS is highly reliable and provides sufficient capabilities to recover from any outages, there can be instances where the cloud computing might fail. Therefore it is desirable to plan in advance steps to ensure better reliability as a necessary objective during the deployment. Thus small businesses can avoid instances wherein the server might crash or reboot on the backend that might prompt the AWS to behave unexpectedly or even become unavailable. Ensure that businesses choose more than one availability zone within a region which can be an expensive option. For example, setting up an Elastic Load Balancer or ELB helps in the effective distribution of incoming application traffic across more than one compute instances. Thus traffic would be automatically diverted towards the healthy instances and thereby avoiding the unhealthy instances in the event of a catastrophic failure of a specific availability zone.

Security

Security is considered to be an important aspect in AWS as businesses can create a large number of production servers at a time and can even remove them with just the click of a mouse. To avoid such problems, AWS suggests setting up of users with limited permissions to effectively handle the resources at their own charge along with a Multi-Factor authentication that is made available for both hardware as well as virtual options.

Cost Estimation

The ability to minimize the infrastructure cost is among the major advantages of Amazon web services. But at the same time studies suggest the operational costs to slightly exceed than expected during certain circumstances. As a means to provide enhanced insight for the users regarding the cost associated with the cloud deployments, a monthly calculator was introduced by AWS which helped in computing the deployment costs on the basis of services being used. It is desirable for smaller businesses to purchase one among the following including either a ‘spot’ or ‘reserved’ compute instance. This is applicable especially for smaller businesses that are looking forward for cost optimization based on the existing deployment.

Out of this, Spot compute instance allows businesses to make use of unused compute capacity at a lesser price. However Reserved compute instance help businesses to do pre-booking or pre-paying in advance for making use of the unused compute capacity. The availability of spot instances cannot be assured for all the regions as there might be some specific regions where the spot instances might not be available. For enhanced cost optimization and Security, a Trusted Advisor Service is offered for tweaking the different dimensions of an AWS deployment. However smaller businesses will have to choose the paid support plan if all the recommendations has to be unlocked.

William Hills is a technical writer at JanBask. He loves writing and sharing topics on Web Design Services, Web Development, Salesforce Services & Cloud services and latest trends going around in web world.