All right. Now, you've learned all there is to know about AWS and you're ready to go build your empire. Even if that isn't true you should still now have a good understanding of a lot of the different services AWS has to offer and how you can use them together like building blocks. To build solutions for your business that scale, are flexible and are reliable. You also should by now understand some of the terminology AWS uses. Knowing this terminology is important for moving forward with your Cloud journey. As you read blog posts or AWS documentation you now should know a lot of the acronyms and phrases that you'll see. What you should also keep in mind as you move forward is the six main benefits of using the AWS Cloud. You'll start to evaluate what applications and solutions will be built in the Cloud. Knowing these benefits can really help you make those decisions in an informed way. Let's start with the first benefit. This is a super important thing to remember. When you are building traditional on-premises data centers you need to invest a large amount of money up front just to get started. You need to invest cash into the actual data center physical space, all the hardware, the staff for racking and stacking that hardware and the overhead of keeping the data center running. For a medium to a large business this can be hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. Then no matter what your utilization is of that data center you have a fixed cost, and consider if your budget around that fixed cost. Billing with AWS is fundamentally different than the traditional billing model we just talked about. Your bill with AWS will be variable month to month as you consume more or less resources. The great thing about this is if you are just getting started there's no need to come up with a million dollars to invest into your AWS environment. Instead, you can start small, get billed for only what you use and as you use more resources over time your bill will fluctuate with that growth. Now, if your bill gets out of your allotted budget you can find ways to save money by turning off unused instances, deleting old resources aren't being used, optimizing your applications, using tools like AWS Trusted Advisor to help you find opportunities to save money. Just because your bill was high one month it doesn't mean you can't get it lowered the next month, and that's just not true with traditional on-premises data center billing. That's the first advantage. The next is, Benefit from massive economies of scale. This one is straightforward. AWS is building up massive amounts of capacity all around the world. In order to build all those data centers AWS is buying huge amounts of hardware. AWS is also an expert at building efficient data centers. We can buy the hardware at a lower price because of the massive volume, and then we install it and run it efficiently. Because of these factors you can achieve a lower variable cost than you could running a data center on your own. Next up is, Stop guessing capacity. When you are building out a traditional data center you need to estimate how much capacity you will need to run your business. Let's say you estimate you will have a user base of 10 million people over the next three years. You purchase enough hardware to support that growth over time. Then turns out you only have about 500,000 users, much lower than you anticipated. Well, guess what, you are still stuck with that cost and hardware for the 10 million users. You overestimated your capacity. The other side of the coin here is that you estimate your capacity too low and you now need to scramble to build out your data center to handle the higher capacity before your customers have a degraded experience or before you lose customers altogether. That takes time and you most likely won't keep up or you will have to put in a heroic effort to achieve it. Guessing your capacity upfront can be problematic if you either over or underestimate. With AWS you don't need to guess your capacity. Instead, provision the resources you need for the now and then use the scaling mechanisms for each resource to scale up or down based on the real life capacity it needs from day to day. A scaling can take minutes with AWS instead of weeks or months with on-premises resources. The next is my personal favorite benefit. Increase speed and agility. With AWS it's easy to try new things. You can spin up test environments and run experiments on new ways to approach solving a problem. Then if that approach didn't work you can just delete those resources and stop incurring cost. Traditional data centers don't offer the same flexibility. Therefore, if you want to run an experiment that will require new servers being bought and installed the cost of the experiment failing is high because you already bought the server. The flexibility of AWS helps drive innovation as well as the ease of provisioning resources. Getting a new database stood up on-premises might take weeks. In AWS, it takes minutes. That ability to quickly get the resources you need helps you get to market quicker. All right, next up. Stop spending money running and maintaining data centers. If you aren't a data center company why spend so much money and time running data centers? Let AWS take the undifferentiated heavy lifting off your hands and instead focus on what makes your business valuable. What makes your offering better than your competitors? AWS lets you focus on finding the answer to that and delighting your customers with new innovative solutions instead of focusing on running hardware in a data center. Last but not least we have, Go global in minutes. Let's say you're a company based in the US and you want to expand your operations to Germany. You have data centers in the US serving this region, but you'll need data centers in Germany to serve that region. Traditionally, you would need to have staff in Germany running and operating a data center for you. With AWS you can just replicate your architecture to a region in Germany. If you're setup correctly you can do this in an automated fashion using tools like AWS CloudFormation. The time it takes for you to expand into a secondary area of the world traditionally can be months or years. With AWS it just takes minutes. That's it. Those are the six main benefits of using AWS. From all of us at AWS congratulations on completing the AWS Cloud practitioner essentials' course. If you want to dive even deeper please check out our other course offerings for more information on AWS products and services. Best of luck to you as you begin your Cloud journey.
