Why organizations adopt or migrate to public cloud: AWS's current "Benefits of Cloud" list (a rework of the older Six Advantages) and the instructor's normalized seven advantages that apply across all cloud providers.

AWS's Benefits of Cloud

  • The list: agility, pay-as-you-go, economy of scale, global reach, security, reliability, high availability, scalability, elasticity 1:23:26
  • This is a rework/expansion of AWS's earlier "Six Advantages of Cloud"; the original six now appear as sub-bullets under the new categories 1:23:52
  • Newly added items vs the original six: high availability, elasticity, reliability, and security 1:23:52
  • Instructor's critique: the AWS list is still missing fault tolerance (and disaster recovery) 1:24:46
  • The cloud-architecture-flavored benefits (HA, scalability, elasticity, etc.) are covered in depth later in the course's Cloud Architecture section 1:24:20

The instructor's seven advantages (normalized across CSPs)

Derived from teaching fundamentals for all major cloud providers; it maps well onto AWS's new benefits list 1:25:20:

  1. Cost-effective — pay for what you consume, no upfront cost, on-demand / pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pricing, thousands of customers sharing the cost of resources; AWS historically said "on-demand pricing", Azure said "pay as you go" — AWS now uses both terms 1:25:20 1:25:51
  2. Global — launch workloads anywhere in the world by just choosing a region 1:26:13
  3. Secure — the provider handles physical security; cloud services can be secure by default, with access configurable to a granular level 1:26:13
  4. Reliable — data backup, disaster recovery, data replication, fault tolerance 1:26:13
  5. Scalable — increase or decrease resources and services based on demand 1:26:13
  6. Elastic — automate scaling during spikes and drops in demand 1:26:13
  7. Current — underlying hardware and managed software is patched, upgraded, and replaced by the provider without interruption to you (a benefit not on AWS's own list) 1:26:13