AWS For Admins For Dummies. Mueller John Paul

many of the administrative tasks for you. Chapter 1 discusses many of the advantages of the cloud for you. However, for a realistic perspective, you must offset these advantages with disadvantages, such as:

      ❯❯ Potential for lower application speed

      ❯❯ Need to maintain a reliable Internet connection

      ❯❯ Loss of flexibility

      ❯❯ Vendors going out of business

      Even though basic hardware needs become less expensive, you do need to consider additional expenses in the form of redundancies. Most organizations find that the hardware costs of moving to the cloud are substantially less than maintaining a full IT department, which is why they make the move. However, you must make the move with the understanding that you have other matters to consider when you do.

       Hosting the services locally

When hosting services locally, you need to provide all the required infrastructure, which can get expensive. AWS does provide guidance on the minimum requirements for hosting a service locally. For example, Figure 2-5 shows the requirements for the AWS Storage Gateway.

       FIGURE 2-5: Make sure that you can actually host the service locally.

A good rule of thumb when hosting services locally is to view any vendor-supplied requirements as minimums. If you don’t plan to load the service heavily, these minimums usually work. However, when you click the Optimizing Gateway Performance link, the first suggestion you see is adding resources to your gateway, as shown in Figure 2-6. Planning for too much capacity is better than for not enough, but getting the configuration as close as possible to what you need will always help financially.

       FIGURE 2-6: Plan ahead for sufficient resources.

      Not all the services will work locally, but you may be surprised to find that many do. The issue is one of defining precisely how you plan to use a given service and the trade-offs that you’re willing to make. For example, when hosting a service locally, you may find it hard to provide the same level of connectivity that you could provide to third parties when hosting the same service in the cloud.

Considering the Network Requirements

      To use the AWS services, you need a network connection. In some cases, you need more than one. You not only need an Internet connection for the AWS user interface, but the services may require dedicated connections as well and these connections can become part of your business network. Because of this close relationship, creating the network configuration carefully is essential. Otherwise, you may find that the AWS network connection conflicts with the configuration used for your business (a problem that occurs more often than you might think).