Metal Toad has been building applications for some of the most well-known global brands for over 15 years and we can help you with yours. AWS, with its 200+ products and services, provides the most cost effective building blocks available for building applications today.
Why build application in the cloud?
Building cloud native applications or retrofitting existing applications to leverage cloud technology can provide some big benefits over time:
- Cost savings - average of 31% infrastructure cost savings vs applications hosted on premise
- Less downtime - 69% reduction in unplanned downtime of applications
- Scalable growth - properly architected cloud application have close to infinite scalability
Application building blocks
Now we get to the fun stuff: the building blocks which can be used to create cloud native applications. In almost all cases, these application building blocks can support multiple front-end frameworks: VUE, Angular, ReactJS (our personal favorite) and have nice shortcuts that can help you build robust extensible apps. Here are some valuable components:
- Amazon Cognito - turnkey scalable, authentication and identity management
- AWS AppSync - consolidates multiple data sources into a single API powered by GraphQL
- AWS Amplify - facilitates building full-stack web and mobile apps
- Amazon Lightsail - launch WordPress, Drupal, or other CMSes in AWS in just a few minutes
- Amazon SQS & Amazon SNS - if your application needs to queue and send email or text messages
- Amazon QuickSight - build out beautiful dashboards quickly using a variety of datasources
Example AWS Cloud Application
You can read all about the buildout of an example AWS application built out using the following stack:
- AWS Amplify
- AWS Auth (a wrapper for Cognito)
- AWS AppSync
- ReactJS
But that's not all. AWS provide services that can be used to build everything from media service platforms, to robotics and IoT fleet management. Here's a visual to help you understand the breadth of options available
Ready to put these services to work for your business? Contact us today for a free quote!
Other AWS Services
All AWS services are by definition "managed services", meaning that AWS makes sure the services are up and running. AWS services can be broken down into a few major categories. Knowing what belongs
- Infrastructure
- Helper services
Infrastructure
AWS infrastructure services, include many of the services that people first think of when they think of AWS: cloud based compute and storage. If you'd like to learn more about these services I'd recommend our articles on AWS cloud computing and Amazon S3 - the most common file storage. There are literally dozens of services that can be summarized as:
- Compute (EC2, Lambda, etc.)
- File Storage (S3, Glacier, etc.)
- Databases (RDS, Athena, etc.)
Helper services
After infrastructure, there are the helper services. These services don't underpin applications (like infrastructure) and they aren't building blocks. Instead they provide services that surround the applications. Here are some examples:
- Migration services (Migration Hub, Datasync, etc)
- Security (Firewall, etc.)
- Application health monitoring (Control Tower, etc)
- Optimization (Elastic Inference, etc.)
- Developer Tools (CodeGuru, etc.)