The cloud is a great choice for so many serious workloads because it’s scalable, elastic, and, often, a lot cheaper than traditional alternatives. Effective deployment provisioning will require some insight into those three features
Scalability
A scalable infrastructure can efficiently meet unexpected increases in demand for your application by automatically adding resources. this most often means dynamically increasing the number of virtual machines (or instances as AWS calls them) you’ve got running
AWS offers its autoscaling service through which you define a machine image that can be instantly and automatically replicated and launched into multiple instances to meet demand
Elasticity
The principle of elasticity covers some of the same ground as scalability—both address managing changing demand. However, while the images used in a scalable environment let you ramp up capacity to meet rising demand, an elastic infrastructure will automatically reduce capacity when demand drops. This makes it possible to control costs, since you’ll run resources only when they’re needed
Cost Management
Besides the ability to control expenses by closely managing the resources you use, cloud computing transitions your IT spending from a capital expenditure (capex) framework into something closer to operational expenditure (opex)
In practical terms, this means you no longer have to spend $10,000 up front for every new server you deploy—along with associated electricity, cooling, security, and rack space costs. Instead, you’re billed much smaller incremental amounts for as long as your application runs
That doesn’t necessarily mean your long-term cloud-based opex costs will always be less than you’d pay over the lifetime of a comparable data center deployment. But it does mean you won’t have to expose yourself to risky speculation about your long-term needs. If, sometime in the future, changing demand calls for new hardware, AWS will be able to deliver it within a minute or two
To help you understand the full implications of cloud compute spending, AWS provides a free Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator at https://aws.amazon.com/ tco-calculator/. This calculator helps you perform proper “apples-to-apples” comparisons between your current data center costs and what an identical operation would cost you on AWS.