1.1 Define the AWS cloud and its value proposition

Definition of the AWS Cloud.
'''AWS Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud services platform, offering compute power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow. Millions of customers are currently leveraging AWS cloud products and solutions to build sophisticated applications with increased flexibility, scalability and reliability.'''

The AWS Cloud provides a broad set of infrastructure services (over 200 services are available), such as computing power, storage options, networking and databases, delivered as a utility: on-demand, available in seconds, with pay-as-you-go pricing. It is available with 81 Availability Zones within 25 geographic regions across the world - with announced plans for 21 more Availability Zones and 7 more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Israel, Spain, Switzerland, and United Arab Emirates (UAE).

AWS’ broad security certification and accreditation, data encryption at rest and in-transit, hardware security modules and strong physical security all contribute to a more secure way to manage your business’ IT infrastructure. With the AWS Cloud, capabilities for controlling, auditing and managing identity, configuration and usage come built into the platform helping you meet your compliance governance and regulatory requirements.

The AWS Value Proposition
Please consult the table below:

But...
Ultimately, the greatest value will be found when architecting for cloud native technologies, rather than a "lift-and-shift" of the existing data center

Six advantages of Cloud Computing
1.   Trade capital expense for variable expense – Instead of having to invest heavily in data centers and servers before you know how you’re going to use them, you can pay only when you consume computing resources, and pay only for how much you consume.

2.   Benefit from massive economies of scale – By using cloud computing, you can achieve a lower variable cost than you can get on your own. Because usage from hundreds of thousands of customers is aggregated in the cloud, providers such as AWS can achieve higher economies of scale, which translates into lower pay as-you-go prices.

3.   Stop guessing capacity – Eliminate guessing on your infrastructure capacity needs. When you make a capacity decision prior to deploying an application, you often end up either sitting on expensive idle resources or dealing with limited capacity. With cloud computing, these problems go away. You can access as much or as little capacity as you need, and scale up and down as required with only a few minutes’ notice.

4.   Increase speed and agility – In a cloud computing environment, new IT resources are only a click away, which means that you reduce the time to make those resources available to your developers from weeks to just minutes. This results in a dramatic increase in agility for the organization, since the cost and time it takes to experiment and develop is significantly lower.

5.   Stop spending money running and maintaining data centers – Focus on projects that differentiate your business, not the infrastructure. Cloud computing lets you focus on your own customers, rather than on the heavy lifting of racking, stacking, and powering servers.

6.   Go global in minutes – Easily deploy your application in multiple regions around the world with just a few clicks. This means you can provide lower latency and a better experience for your customers at minimal cost.

Definitions
1.   Shared responsibility model – The shared responsibility model is an agreement where Amazon is responsible for the infrastructure whereas the customer of Amazon's Web Services is responsible for everything else. Amazon's infrastructure is defined as the hardware, software, networking, and facilities that run AWS.