Introduction to AWS Economics (2015)

Reducing Costs and Complexity

Investments Considered:

  • Capital expenditures
  • Operational expenditures
  • Staffing
  • Opportunity costs
  • Licensing
  • Facilities overhead

Expansion of Data Center or colocation footprint:

  • Capacity planning
    • Servers, hardware maintenance, pricing
  • Utilization
    • Average utilization rate
    • Provisioning for peak load
  • Operations
    • Facilities, international expansion, utilities (electricity, cooling), and budgetting for peak time
  • Optimization
    • Automatic scaling, capacity reservation, quick infrastructure expansion costs

Advantages of Cloud Technology

  • Decrease your TCO
  • Reduce complexity
  • Adjust capacity on the fly
  • Reduce time to market
  • Deploy quickly, event worldwide
  • Increase efficiencies
  • Innovate more
  • Spend your resource strategically
  • Enhanced security

AWS Economics

Benefits to the AWS users:

  • Global operations
  • High availability
  • Low costs due to high volume
  • Only pay for what you use
  • Economies of scale
  • Financial flexibility

Common cost drivers in a data center

  • Server hardware
  • Data center facilities costs
  • Storage hardware
  • Server hardware maintenance
  • Network hardware