AWS (Amazon Web Services) is our main IaaS cloud provider. The main reasons why we chose it over other alternatives are the following:

• It provides a highly granular approach to IaaS, offering over one hundred independent services that range from quantum computing to servers for videogames.
• It has a fully granular pay-as-you-go pricing model, which allows us to pay exactly for what we are using.
• It complies with many global top security standards.
• It has a highly redundant infrastructure distributed across the world, making us feel comfortable when it comes to its availability and reliability.
• It is a cloud infrastructure leader, according to Gartner.
• It is the oldest cloud provider.

Alternatives

Google Cloud Platform is an alternative that did not exist at the time we migrated to the cloud. Its service catalog is much smaller, which means less flexibility.

Note: Microsoft Azure is another alternative that did not exist at the time we migrated to the cloud. A review is pending.

Usage

We use the following AWS services:

• Identity and access management: IAM
• Cost management: Cost Management
• Monitoring and logging: CloudWatch
• Elastic cloud computing: EC2
• Cloud file storage: S3
• Serverless computing: Lambda
• Elastic block store: EBS
• Elastic load balancing: ELB
• Key management system: KMS
• Application cluster: EKS
• Virtual private cloud: VPC
• NoSQL database: DynamoDB
• Cloud VPN: VPN
• Data warehouse: Redshift
• Batch processing: Batch
• Machine learning: SageMaker
• Elastic container service: ECS
• Simple queue service: SQS