Other Benefits
As you know, there are plenty of benefits when you move to the AWS Cloud, and these benefits certainly impact the economic benefits that we have discussed so far. Let’s now investigate the benefits of AWS automation and the benefits of using managed services inside of AWS. While these benefits may seem out of place in a chapter that is focused on economic benefits, both automation and managed service usage can have profound effects on cost savings for an organization. In fact, you will note that the very first benefits we list here for each are none other than cost savings.
Benefits of Automation
AWS makes automation simple for engineers. This is a design goal because automation in the AWS Cloud brings many benefits in terms of efficiency, scalability, and overall operational excellence. Here are some key advantages of automation in the AWS Cloud:
Cost savings: When automation is used in the AWS Cloud, it can ensure that resources are used the most appropriately for the given demands. The use of Auto Scaling in EC2 provides a great example of cost savings due to automation. You provide the basic parameters desired for EC2 resources, and AWS ensures that the resources scale as needed. This can have a massive impact on costs, of course, especially when you remember that EC2 resource costs are based on EC2 runtimes.
Elasticity: Thanks to automation (as just described for EC2 Auto Scaling), it is easy to scale resources as needed in the AWS Cloud.
Fast deployments: With automation, you can create solutions in the cloud with remarkable speed. Consider the time and effort and costs that you would incur if you needed to build database servers from scratch and then run those servers in different parts of the world to accommodate local users. This might be a massive and complex deployment. With AWS Relational Database Services (RDS), you can have the required environment built and running in seconds.
Increased reliability: The use of automation helps eliminate human errors and increases the consistency of deployments.
Increased security: Automation assists in securing your solutions in the cloud. It also helps detect and respond to security issues. AWS also makes it possible to automate the deployment of security to begin with.
Lifecycle management: Thanks to automation, you can more effectively implement the various phases of lifecycles for your various solutions. For example, in AWS S3, you can automate the transfer of storage between various storage classes, and you can even automate the archival and deletion processes.
DevOps practices: Automation can foster your use of DevOps practices. By automating build, test, and deployment pipelines, development teams can deliver software more rapidly and reliably and foster collaboration between development and operations teams.
IT focus: When you automate repetitive maintenance types of tasks, your IT teams can focus on new technologies and advancements of solutions and their efficiency.