For businesses still reticent to move to the cloud, it may come down to cost. How can an investment in cloud services deliver cost-efficiency? At ERP Suites, we use Amazon EC2 to scale compute capacity and deliver business value.
What is EC2?
The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) allows users to quickly spin up virtual machines on AWS infrastructure. Among the most popular AWS Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings, it's the benchmark in a competitive public cloud arena.
With the EC2 web service, customers can gain and configure computing capacity in the cloud with minimal friction. It offers complete control over your computing resources. ERP Suites consultants rely on Amazon EC2 to meet aggressive migration schedules and budgets. The ease and speed of development also support rapid proofs of concept for our software engineers.
Eliminate unnecessary expenses
Before the cloud, you had to purchase expensive hardware to create or boost computing power. Now with Amazon EC2's On-Demand pricing model, you can launch a development environment in minutes. As requirements change, you can scale up or down and never pay for more than you use.
Even if your capacity needs are somewhat predictable, Amazon EC2 still offers an advantage. Reserved Instances beat On-Demand pricing to help you realize a more cost-effective solution for long-term workloads as well.
Expect more for less
This isn't a case of "you pay for what you get." Amazon EC2 provides all the necessary resources to ensure your workload lives up to high-performance expectations. Start by selecting from more than 300 instance types running on your choice of operating system. Here are a few examples:
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| General Purpose instances for business-critical applications, small and mid-sized databases, web tier, and applications. | Compute Optimized instances for high-performance computing, batch processing, and video encoding. | Memory Optimized instances for high-performance databases, distributed web scale in-memory caches, and real-time big data analytics. |
Accelerated Computing instances for machine learning, graphic-intensive applications, and gaming. | Storage Optimization instances for NoSQL databases, data warehousing, and distributed file systems. |
Protect business continuity
These days business success depends upon application accessibility. Amazon EC2 gives users the confidence of knowing their workloads are safe from potential service outages. EC2s are tied to regions, and the current AWS service-level agreement (SLA) is committed to a 99.99% availability. Each region consists of at least two availability zones. Using the robust AWS backbone, this means you can run virtual machines in one of 77 availability zones worldwide and ensure backup instances are always at the ready.
Extend the value of EC2 instances
Reliability and flexibility have made Amazon EC2 the industry standard in the public cloud. It plays well with other AWS services giving users multiple means to gain control over their computing resources.
- Combine EC2 with Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) to run databases, enterprise applications, containers, big data analytics engines, or file systems.
- Use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor your EC2 instances. It collects operational data then presents it in an automated dashboard giving you insight into application health.
- Save your EC2 as a template using AWS CloudFormation. Then you can provision resources in a safe and repeatable manner, and CloudFormation will launch your environment for you.
- AWS CloudTrail automatically records and stores event logs for actions made within your EC2 resources. You can log administrative events like creating, modifying, or deleting your EC2 instances. This helps you keep track of how, when, and who is interacting with your instances to satisfy governance and compliance requirements.
Amazon EC2 gives users the tools to design failure-resilient applications without the hassle of physical infrastructure management. It's a great option when you want to build and control cloud-first applications. Whether you need to launch a test environment or run a mission-critical enterprise workload, EC2 is the compute service for you.
Need help configuring, optimizing and integrating EC2? ERP Suites is an AWS Partner. We align cloud services with business goals to help you maximize your cloud technology investment. Learn more at erpsuites.com.
