Question

Amazon can generate extra revenue from other businesses by offering its excess capacity to those who need it. Like most companies, Amazon uses only a small portion of its total computing capacity at any time. Its infrastructure is considered by many to be among the most robust in the world.

Write a 1-2 page analysis using the referencing the following criteria:

Think of an idea for a startup business. Explain how this business could utilize Amazon’s Web Services (AWS).

How do the concepts of capacity planning and scalability apply to this case? Apply these concepts both to Amazon and to customers of your business.

Answer 1

What are Amazon Web Services (AWS)?

AWS provides cloud computing platforms to various individuals, governments and companies. It is a subsidiary of Amazon. It provides services on a paid subscription basis. It is very helpful for any kind of businesses as it provides numerous services like, servers, storage, networking, remote computing, security etc.

How can businesses utilize AWS?

AWS supports every kind of business or startup with its services.

1. If you are planning for a startup, like for example a clothing business. AWS can help you fuel your business. Because the startup services AWS offers are 'AWS activate'. It provides training and will also help you with the resources to grow your clothing business. Not only this it provides the tips of various entrepreneurs who have used this AWS service for growing their business.
2. For reaching out to various customers your clothing business needs to create a website, just like other clothing websites. Through this website you can provide each and every detail of your clothing business from various designs of clothes, placing orders to payments. AWS can help in creating the website for your business. It allows you to name and register your own domain for your website. You can also host your website with or without a web server.
3. What if you want to receive orders for your clothing business through your phone? This is possible with the help of mobile applications. AWS can also be used to host mobile applications. For this AWS provides numerous services like storage, push notifications, content delivery, and analytics. Through this mobile app you can store your data like customers information, including their orders, payment details and many more. You can easily utilize AWS to host your mobile application.  
4. When your clothing business will expand, you will have a big amount of data including your customers details, payment processor, clothing, sales staff details etc. AWS provides you with storage options also so that you can manage your data accordingly. You can have control, who has access to the storage. Storage solutions like Amazon S3 can help in this.
5. Further, big data applications will be required for your clothing business to support velocity and variety of data.

Data warehousing, fraud detection can be done easily. Whichever data application resources you will use, you only need to pay for that particular resource.

What are capacity planning and scalability?

Scalability is the capability to perform under an expanding workforce.

As you are using amazon web services for your business, amazon will have more number of customers, because of which business will grow. And AWS will help customers in storing big data which will scale the business more.

Capacity planning measures the system performance and determines patterns in usage to predict demand.

Capacity planning provides budgeting and scaling benefits.

It helps amazon by ensuring and validating data integrity across different data tables during business changes.