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Danilo Costa
Danilo Costa

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AWS - A brief introduction

Okay, everybody knows that "DevOps" is the new "thing" in the IT area, the reason for that is mainly because of the huge popularity of many cloud providers, and that popularity has a good reason:

Nobody wants anymore to host an entire data center inside of a company building, okay maybe you could see some companies doing that like Cipsoft (the company behind Tibia) as they showed us when Tibia did 25 years:

Little red riding hood

But the truth is, if wanna build a new software from scratch, it's a bad idea to do that using a data center in nowadays. The first guy to notice it as a way to offer "cloud as a service" is Jeff Bezos. Okay, maybe we have other people and other companies that have done it before, but Bezos was the guy who started it on a huge scale, only after him did we get other companies doing it with more effort like Microsoft or Google.

Jeff Bezos, the stonk guy

So... What are the advantages of using AWS?

  1. First we've the agility! Noticing that you don't need anymore to take care of a physical data center, you get more time to care about the logic and configuration of your server

  2. Second we've "Security", but that's a sensible topic. Before anything, it's necessary to say that AWS is not 100% secure, the reason for that is because the security of your app starts with your app! If there's any blind spot in your code, it doesn't matter if you're using AWS or any other provider.

  3. We've scalability, but that topic is a double-edged sword. Once Uncle Bob said that a company could close its doors because of a bad code, but nobody paid much attention to that because it sounded like something from another world. But I've seen it with my own eyes, A company that I worked before closed its doors because of a bad code base, everybody tried to advise the CEO about it but he didn't care until he could not pay AWS anymore... On the other hand, I worked for a company that had a huge base of users and a large quantity of requests per day, and I'll not say numbers but I swear, only because of the code quality, they're paying less than the first company I said.

But pay attention to Scalability!

Huge Kirby destroying a city

When you make a new AWS account, you have for free a total of 750 hours per month of EC2 instances (EC2 is like "Amazon virtual computers", I'll talk more about it in the next post). And also you've it for an entire year! FOR FREE! But when we're talking about real applications it's normal to notice that 750hours per month isn't so much. And if your app is used for more hours, the more you pay for using a cloud service. That's the reason why big tech companies are still using their own data centers. And that's also the reason why you need to add a better user experience and a good code base to your app, to avoid problems with it!

That's all for today guys, I'm writing an entire series of posts to teach everybody everything I know about AWS, and that's the Beginning!

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