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Public Cloud provider

Why AWS?

Context

The first and one of the most important decisions is where to host the infrastructure needed to implement this SaaS platform. Given that the infrastructure will host multiple services and customers at the same time, we need certain warranties of scalability, availability, security, etc. Therefore, this is not a trivial decision and requires careful evaluation.

The chosen provider was AWS, for the following reasons:

  • Technological leader: The Gartner consulting firm places AWS as the leader on both the completeness of vision and ability to execute categories, followed at a considerable distance by Microsoft Azure (the only other provider that makes it into the leader quadrant).
  • Huge adoption (market share): AWS is the most used public cloud provider. It is estimated that AWS holds 40% of the total market share, which is more than the rest of the big players (Azure, Google Cloud, IBM) combined.
  • Reliability and Scalability: very large companies like Netflix host their entire infrastructure on AWS, which is a good sign of the abilities of AWS to scale an deliver reliable systems.
  • Feature rich: AWS is a mature platform with a huge catalog of products (and growing every day) that appeal to a wide range of use cases.
  • High availability: AWS offers data-center in various regions all around the world. In each region, multiple availability zones can be used to offer high-availability environments. Having multiple regions can help building global applications or deploy services that are compliant with data-residency regulations.
  • Security: AWS takes security very seriously and is compliant with major regulations like GDPR (Europe) or HIPAA (USA). Due to the sensitive nature of the data we are going to handle, this is a very important point.
  • Extensive documentation, learning resources, support, and tooling: since AWS is the most used public cloud provider, there exists a lot of resources online that makes deploying any solution easier. AWS has a great community and a huge ecosystem of tools or integrations with other systems. It also provides a complete API to manage every resource on the cloud, so custom integrations can be developed easily.

We’ve also picked the AWS Ireland and North Virginia regions to deploy our services in, for the following reasons:

  • First to receive updates: as it is considered the main region in Europe and the US, updates (both on hardware and products) will always arrive first to these regions by Amazon. AWS does gradual deployment of changes across regions (especially on hardware) and that means that some updates take weeks or months to be available on other regions after they’ve been released on Ireland
  • Availability: the Ireland region consists of 3 availability zones (separate data-centers) and North Virginia consists of 6 AZs, which ensures high availability and resilience against natural disasters, electricity/network outages, etc.