I have engaged with many startup companies who have chosen Amazon Web Services (AWS) as their hosting to make their websites accessible online. Most of them, if not all of them have chosen AWS for its wide variety of available service stores such as SQL, DynamoDB, and Amazon S3.
Amazon Web Services give enterprises the necessary building blocks to scale databases that can be stored, manipulated, and retrieved at a minimal cost. Although, the challenge comes with the complexity of building a solid foundation, as there is no one-size-fits-all. That is why it is worthwhile to find amazon web services cloud practitioner that can give your business an edge over the competition. Building a back-end for your business is not easy, so here are some quick tips on how you should approach amazon web services.
Scalable Data With Amazon Web Services
Scaling data is often overlooked and can be detrimental to any business. Don’t wait to achieve a position where your business experiences traction and successful growth to only reach a screeching halt due to poor architecture. Maintaining cost-effecting automatic scaling for data storage and quick access is crucial.
There are too many instances where a business will under/overscale their data capacity resulting in a catastrophe. This is why scalable data is so important and it is why AWS has partnered with Harvard to expand into quantum networking.
Leveraging A Balance With Amazon Web Services
So how do find a balance between under/over-engineering when scaling your business with Amazon Web Services? The short answer is – as simple as possible
- Knowing What AWS Services To Use.
Having an understanding of the available services provided at AWS can greatly ease the pain of finding the proper tools and services that will be the most beneficial. That are many times I have witnessed people building back-end systems or platforms and purchasing tools or services without realizing they could they can find the same thing somewhere else.
- Visualizing.
Visualizing the major steps between now and the target goal helps paint the key steps that your business needs to take next, then jot these steps down. If you can’t visualize it because it’s too complex, then your company might not be at the right stage for building.
- Test Your Solution
Once you have visualized the steps and understand your business problems that need to be tackled, put your solution to the test. Imagine your service or application being used by your customers but multiply your customer base by 1,000. Can the server handle the spike in requests? Does your app fill the system capacity as it scales up and if so how many databases can it handle? Jot these down as well.
- Reposition Your Strategy
Now take what you have written down on your paper and for each step towards your goal and scale those out. This does not mean buying bigger, better systems, disks, or databases. This simply means using what you have and increasing the quantity.
What happens when you scale AWS elastic containers or EC2 systems to 100?
What happens when the pipe/ data between different Amazon Web Services like compute and storage systems become full?
- Tool Chest
Understand what tools you have that can help your business succeed. Amazon Web Services has some great tools to leverage. Some AWS services such as Elastic Load Balancers, which are are cheap ways to autoscaling groups that help with server crashes, etc.
- Apply Your Knowledge
Now here’s the key: Don’t build everything to scale to 20 million users. Actually, scale it for one. However, when the time comes, consider the main points within this blog as you begin to build your software, and always keep these points in mind. It takes somewhat of a little more time, but the dividends moving forward will result in payoffs.
The last thing you want is for your business to experience that high-end growth but realize that you have racked up a ton of technical debt that has a tax. So the idea here is to make good decisions throughout the process of building and growing your start-up so that tax doesn’t become a major loss for your business.