Summary

The size and quality of a major cloud provider like AWS means that its customers can often benefit from higher-quality security, availability, and reliability than they could provide locally.

While AWS customers are still responsible for the applications they run in the cloud, they don’t need to worry about the underlying physical infrastructure that’s managed by AWS.

Much of the attraction of cloud computing is the ability to pay for only the services you use, and only as you use them. This allows the provisioning of sophisticated applications with virtually no capital expenses (capex). You will, of course, need to assess and manage the operating expenses (opex).

Server virtualization makes it possible to more densely pack software operations on physical hardware, potentially driving down the costs and improving the time-to-deployment of compute workloads. An even more “virtualized” kind of virtualization is serverless computing, where customers...