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A year after Lancom earned Amazon Web Services Advanced Consulting Partner Status, our technical director Imran Sadiq has become one of only six people in New Zealand to be named an ‘AWS Cloud Warrior’.

‘Cloud Warrior’ is the informal name given to recipients of the Amazon Web Services Partner Network (APN) APN Ambassador status. APN ambassadors are technical experts passionate about contributing their technical knowledge to the community through public speaking engagements and digital content. An APN ambassador possesses deep expertise in the AWS platform, AWS certifications and is an active employee of an APN consulting partner.

It wasn’t all that long ago that the question of ‘security’ was considered a major impediment to the adoption of cloud computing services. Happily, the ‘theoretical’ security problems which arise from having your data on someone else’s computer, haven’t been borne out in any practical sense. That’s why cloud computing, including platform-as-a-service from Amazon Web Services and many other providers, has become the defacto way of resourcing companies from the smallest to the biggest.

If you are running servers or workloads in the AWS cloud, you’re probably aware of the Amazon Web Services Well Architected framework. First introduced by AWS in 2015, this framework is widely used by AWS Certified Architects to create a planned and structured infrastructure which will meet your needs today and into the future.

Consisting of five pillars, the Well-Architected framework sets the scene for having in place cloud foundations that complies with best practices. In this article, we dig a little deeper into it and consider the core pillars of AWS Foundations, and why you really should be using them in your environment.

Don’t be fooled by the deceptive ease with which you can get started on the Amazon Web Services cloud. While it is certainly true that you can get stuck in with nothing more than a credit card and a vague idea of what you’re after, it pays to start with sound foundations so that as your needs grow and evolve (as they inevitably do – just about everyone who tries AWS very quickly becomes a big fan of it’s low-cost, high-value services), you don’t end up with a horrendous tangle.

When it comes to the cloud, the biggest name is Amazon Web Services (AWS) which commands more market share than the next four competitors combined. Not bad for a bookseller! So, when you’re looking at migrating infrastructure to the cloud, and there are many good reasons to do just that, AWS is probably one of the best available options.

Those who are considering migration need to know just exactly what is involved. There are challenges and issues which must be noted and handled to ensure a smooth transition to either a complete ‘in the cloud’ setup, or the more common hybrid arrangement, where some infrastructure remains on-premise and some is moved to AWS.

Typically, the first thing most assume when dealing with cloud services is that there will be a cost saving. The next is that the costs will be variable, and they are. What ‘they’ don’t tell you is that by using Amazon Web Services (AWS), it is possible to get lost in the cloud and end up with a bill much bigger than anticipated. Here’s how that can happen.

Let's start by considering a trully uknown - AWS Cost Accounting

Pricing for AWS is completely transparent.  The price for each service is clearly labelled online and publicly available.  Amazon’s list prices are the same for all customers, and the only discounts come in the form of volume discounts based on usage, or Reserved Instances (RIs).

So if that's so transparent, how is it an unknown? The devil is in the details