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Subhash Tyler 🚀
Subhash Tyler 🚀

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Why Billion Dollar Companies betting big on AWS Cloud

Setting up physical datacenters, servers, infrastructure and managing them is a bit hard and expansive for companies.

Amazon launches its public cloud services namely AWS cloud in March 14, 2006, combining the three initial service offerings of Amazon S3 cloud storage, SQS, and EC2, and if we see AWS offering in 2020 it's 175 products.
Over the last couple of years, from small startups to large enterprises have shown a huge growing interest in public clouds such as AWS.

Managing operational expenses on public clouds is very easy for starting a business or even migrating and existing one to it.
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Let's take a look at SLACK which uses AWS cloud services. Slack is the cloud-based team collaboration tool developed in 2013 under the team of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. It was initially built for a company to work in a team. Now, it is used all over the leading enterprises with an estimate of over a million daily active users. I caught headlines on the Internet like Slack to spend at least $250 million on Amazon Web Services over five years and there s one more that caught my eye Slack and AWS join forces to drive agility in software development.

"The future of enterprise software will be driven by the combination of cloud services and workstream collaboration tools," said Stewart Butterfield, CEO, and co-founder of Slack.

A business-like Slack needed a scalable infrastructure, low implementation costs. So they turned to Amazon Web Services. Slack migration with AWS took less than an hour which in other case take weeks to scale an upgrade. Costs were lower and less staff was needed to maintain the minimal on-site hardware.

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Slack relies on simple cloud architecture (EC2 instances behind Elastic Load Balancers, S3, etc.), but it benefits greatly from the resource availability that AWS can provide. While adding capacity in traditional data centers took weeks, it is a non-issue with AWS. For a fast-growing company like Slack, the cloud was not only the best choice, it was probably the only one. In addition, the managed nature of most of AWS’ services has allowed Slack to minimize their IT management involvement in order to focus on their much sought-after product instead.

What If Companies Wanted to Opt-Out of AWS?

Even if we don't care about their contractual obligations, they have to face a huge task for re-architecting their components, and of course, they don't do it because they don't want to focus on building infrastructure so they are going to avoid it, also migrating data from AWS is also costly.

Recently, DROPBOX moved out of Amazon's AWS for its own infrastructure. but still, not many companies are willing to take that chance.

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sources:
https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/slack/
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/26/slack-to-spend-at-least-250-million-on-aws-over-five-years.html
https://n2ws.com/blog/aws-cloud/aws-case-studies-lyft-pinterest-slack
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