Why do businesses need cloud services like AWS & Azure?

Answer 1

While public cloud hosting on AWS, Azure, etc is very popular these days, it is not the only option for businesses. The primary benefits of hosting a business' site on the public cloud is that it is easy to scale up when the business is growing, and you can save money by only paying for the resources you need. The alternative to sharing public cloud resources is for the business to buy servers and manage them independently, but purchasing and managing servers can get expensive, especially if the business does not have that expertise.

For example, say a business sells flags online, and they know they can handle all their online purchases with 2 servers but they will need to buy more servers if they get any more traffic. Maybe they expect to have a lot more purchases on Flag Day, so they buy a third server to keep the site up that day. That takes a lot of time and effort, plus they have to pay to run and maintain the extra server for the rest of the year with their regular non-Flag-Day traffic.

If the used the public cloud, they could easily get an extra server for the day with a few button clicks, and then they can return those resources to the public cloud the next day without paying extra. So, the main aspects businesses like are convenience and cost-efficiency. Of course, there are still plenty of businesses online which run on their own private servers.