On-premises and cloud computing
Before the cloud, companies and organizations hosted and maintained hardware such as compute, storage, and networking equipment in their own data centers. They often allocated entire infrastructure departments to take care of their data centers, which resulted in costly operations that made some workloads and experimentation impossible.
As internet use became more widespread, the demand for compute, storage, and networking equipment increased. For some companies and organizations, the cost of maintaining a large physical presence was unsustainable. To solve this problem, cloud computing emerged.
Cloud computing is an on-demand delivery of IT resources over the internet with primarily pay-as-you-go pricing. With cloud computing, companies do not have to manage and maintain their own hardware and data centers. Instead, companies like AWS own and maintain data centers and provide virtual data center technologies and services to companies and users over the internet.
To help differentiate between running workloads on premises versus in the cloud, consider a scenario in which your developers must deploy a new application feature. Before they deploy, the team wants to test the feature in a separate quality assurance (QA) environment that has the same configurations as production. In an on-premises solution, an additional environment requires you to buy and install hardware, connect the necessary cabling, provision power, install operating systems, and more. These tasks can be time consuming and expensive. Meanwhile, the new feature’s time-to-market increases while the developers wait for the QA environment. In contrast, if you run your application in the cloud, you can replicate an entire production environment, as often as needed, in a matter of minutes or even seconds. Instead of physically installing hardware and connecting cabling, the solution is managed over the internet.
Using cloud computing saves time during setup and removes the undifferentiated heavy lifting. If you look at any application, you’ll see that some of its aspects are very important to your business, like the code. However, other aspects are no different than any other application you might make – for instance, the compute the code runs on. By removing repetitive common tasks that don’t differentiate your business, like installing virtual machines (VMs) or storing backups, you can focus on what is strategically unique to your business and let AWS handle the time-consuming tasks that don’t separate you from your competitors. That's where AWS fits into all of this.
AWS provides cloud computing services. The IT resources mentioned in the cloud computing definition are AWS services. For the course's corporate directory application, you will use AWS services to architect a scalable, highly available, and cost-effective infrastructure to host the corporate directory application. That way, you can get the app out into the world quickly, without managing heavy-duty physical hardware.
Source- Amazon