Andrej Koelewijn

Even if you are not planning to put your applications in the cloud, it’s a good learning experience to experiment with Amazon AWS Cloud. It enables you to easily and cheaply experiment with different infrastructure and deployment scenario’s. It’s also full of best practices regarding high availability, scaling, stateless servers, SOA architecture principles, security, etc.

Using AWS changes your expectations how your internal data center should operate. Why can’t i have multiple testing environments? Why can’t my continuous deployment process create instances on the fly? Why do i need to wait weeks to have the hardware i need? Why can’t i just define a template for my infrastructure requirements, and start all required components with the push of a button?

I expect Cloud providers like AWS to raise the level of service you expect from your internal IT department.