AWS stands alone

CIO recently ran an article about Amazon Web Services and the fact that Gartner claims they are pretty much well ahead of the pack in the leadership space of IaaS. This is not that surprising, I mean Amazon was one of the first to offer cloud computing first with EC2 (elastic computing) and S3 (Storage) and now with AWS. When you help to define a market, being seen as the leader of it is really yours to lose.

We are actually just starting to use Amazon for Infrastructure, though we have used a lot of SaaS vendors, like Salesforce.com, Okta and Google. In fact the event that made the change a priority for us was a data center move. The move will take us 46 hours (according to the plan) and being without our primary web site for that long wasn't a real popular thought, so we moved it to AWS. 

We chose them because it was so easy. Setting an account up is easy, adding machines is a snap and when we decided this morning we really needed a SQL database to go along with it for some of our applications, it took minutes to provision that too. It's cheap, especially for short term needs like this, and can easily fit on a credit card and be expensed to the company. Many people underestimate how important that is, but that ability to work within financial guidelines is a big deal.

We will find out this weekend how it works, but so far I'm impressed.