Why We Are Passionate about AWS

One of my colleagues posted this picture the other day, and he’s certainly not alone in expressing this view.

I found myself thinking, “When it comes to Amazon Web Services (AWS), I fundamentally disagree.” What AWS is providing simply cannot run on YOUR computers. With all the computing power and workload knowledge at their disposal, AWS is reinventing computing by creating new service capabilities that either didn’t exist or wouldn’t have been viable, previously.

Take Lambda, for example. It’s a slice of computing power that executes a piece of code (node.js, python, javascript, java, .net, etc.) that you provide, typically, in less than a second. Would it be worth having that type of architecture in your own corporate infrastructure? Absolutely not. You’d still have to pay for the computer on which that function would run, a framework for your applications to take advantage of it, a security model on which it could be accessed securely, and a routing mechanism to process the results of the function. The investment would be enormous and it simply wouldn’t make sense to do it on your own. Since AWS already has the other service investments in place, it’s paved the way for server-less application environments that Lambda enables.

AWS has an immense investment in machine learning and has made those resources available and affordable to customers—from the deep-down machine learning (ML) modeling capability to service layer tools that capitalize on those capabilities. One such new service called Textract threatens to destroy optical character recognition (OCR) as we know it. Using computer vision and machine learning, Textract can more reliably “read” a scanned document, understand its sections and relationships, and return not just ‘text’, but a data model. Again, prior AWS investment in other services kicks in additional value. Where’s the original scan coming from? A synchronized S3 folder, perhaps? Where’s the data going? To a managed AWS database via a lambda trigger?

The ways in which AWS services can be combined fundamentally create new ways to think about project architectures and go far beyond simply renting a virtual machine. Our last three AWS projects were far cheaper to implement, free of the usual IT project maintenance concerns—no OS upgrades, no database version upgrades, no backups, no failover setups. AWS allows you to focus on delivering the task at hand, not the supporting infrastructure.

We are passionate believers in this platform. Got a project in mind? Let Workflow Studios show you how we see it through an AWS lens.