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Running Head: EVALUATION 1

EVALUATION 6

Evaluation Report

Patrick M. Carrasquillo

University of Phoenix

BSA/531

Aviv Raveh

12/20/2021

Reasons for Switching to Cloud Architecture

Many organizations have decided to embrace Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) methodology, in which companies allow employees to bring and use their own devices for work. This decreases the cost of new machine deployment but also creates several issues that cloud computing can solve (McHaney, 2021). The biggest of these issues that arises is your ability to maintain a unified IT environment for your company when you don’t control the device. With cloud services, this issue becomes null and void, as the user simply needs to download the corresponding app on their mobile devices or go to a web browser on their PC/Mac to access the cloud application.

The fact that IT experts are hard to find as well as expensive, many companies don’t employ an IT professional or consultant, they struggle with putting the same technology in place that larger companies can employ putting those small companies at a disadvantage. Most small companies will not think about trying to deploy a server and complicated infrastructure, because they won’t have the staff to maintain it, but it is a necessary evil for many on premise technologies. With cloud services any company can find a cloud-based software that is similar to or better than the on-premises technology that they are thinking about deploying. That software, server, and security is all maintained by the cloud software vendor allowing a small company enterprise level technology without needing an entire IT staff.

Resilient Architectures

In cloud computing, resilient architecture is a cloud computing design that can deal with errors during operation and to deal with an incorrect entry. Resilience can cover many areas of computing, such as programming, machine learning as well as safety. A design that does not lock easily or is not affected by a single application failure (Drayer, 2018). A design that recovers quickly or resists well in exceptional circumstances a design that is not completely affected by an error in one aspect of it. A design that offers a wide range of capabilities.

Designing resilient architecture within an organization helps in minimizing downtime by two-thirds. Resilient architecture ensures systems functionality regardless of minimum errors. It creates a conducive working environment where people can work with minimum destructions. In cloud computing, any application that can fail without affecting the entire system or other applications can be said to be resilient.

Purpose of AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is set of on-demand services offered for business, personal use, and for government project where one pay what he uses. It is a subsidiary of Amazon which is helping individuals, large- and small-scale businesses to build scalable and reliable applications/services.

Instead of buying new servers or add more servers for your application/service and set up an infrastructure on premise, you can simply deploy your whole infrastructure directly on the cloud, so that you don’t have to worry about scaling in or scaling out servers for your application, AWS does it for you (Wittig, 2018). It is a similar service to Azure and Google Cloud. They provide a wide range of services which comes under domains such as Storage, compute, networking, security, monitoring, developer tools, etc.

Your alternative to such a platform (and there are others) is to buy servers and co-locate them in data centers. Easy enough to do but you get to add months upon months to your planned growth, and you’ll have to own them, and you’ll have to pay various taxes on them (like personal property tax) and you’ll have to be the one to figure out what to do with them when they are done.

How AWS Helps Design Resilient Architectures

AWS services are designed with functional resiliency mind, yet you are liable for the engineering and design. While functional resiliency can be confounded, AWS can make itemized processes more straightforward to make do. Outfitted with the right AWS administrations, associations can accomplish ideal IT flexibility and accessibility with comprehensive planning. AWS can be installed to make it simpler for teams to find shortcomings in their surroundings at scale. This feature helps team with taking on an "everything flops at last" outlook, which will help them with focusing on resilient plan designs.

Advantages of AWS

AWS resources (storage, database, etc.) are replicated in several availability zone (geographically spread data centers) in a way that a power outage, fire or natural disaster occurring in a data center, will not cause any data loss nor service interruption because the replicas will be automatically replacing the “broken” node(s).

AWS provides top notch features across different industries, systems, applications, as well as business processes to meet objectives (McHaney, 2021). In a local data center, you will have to take care of data encryption, keys management, hacker attacks, physical access protection of the computer room, etc. In AWS even the communication among servers within the AWS intranet is encrypted and keys are dynamically rotated so even in case of breach of one server no further servers will be affected.

Disadvantages of AWS

AWS tries to optimize for their AWS based platform solutions, if you depend too much on them, it is not easy to shift. This is not a real problem but the more of their service you use the more the cost adds up. Optimizing managed services cost i.e., your cloud bill may be high as your utilization may be below 20%, This would require some real engineering, measuring, and tuning /scheduling to bump it up. Some cases AWS Lambda would save you money and in some cases it will not (Derry, 2019). Some cases auto-scaling will save you money and some cases it will not. This optimization could be a big headache and you could spend big bucks on cloud services if you are not careful about all these scaling up instances.

Competitors

Competitor	Strengths	Weaknesses
Microsoft Azure	· Easy to use and install · Compatible with many platforms	· Allow maximization of idle capacity · Few payment options
Alibaba Cloud	· Provides an exclusive range of cloud computing products/ and services · Alibaba Cloud is committed to the highest levels of compliance including PCI DSS, HIPAA and GDPR.	· Expensive to Install · High monthly charges
Google	· Higher Productivity owing to Quick Access to Innovation · It's cheap as compared to other cloud platforms	· Fewer features as compared to other cloud platforms · It's difficult to start and have small components

Reference

Derry, R. (2019). AWS: Amazon web services: The complete guide from beginners for Amazon web services. Independently Published.

Wittig, M., & Wittig, A. (2018). Amazon web services in action. Pearson Professional.

Drayer, E. (2018). Resilient operation of distribution grids with distributed-hierarchical architecture. kassel university press GmbH.

McHaney, R. (2021). Cloud technologies: An overview of cloud computing technologies for managers. John Wiley & Sons.