What is Amazon Web Services?

When you hear the name “Amazon”, the first thing that probably comes to your mind is the Amazon marketplace. But there’s another place where Amazon is the market leader – in cloud computing services.

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform is currently used by over 1.45 million businesses from 245 countries. According to Statista, AWS also has the largest market share of all cloud infrastructure services providers with 34%. Microsoft Azure takes second place with a 21% market share, while Google Cloud is third with 11%.

The biggest reason for this popularity? Versatility. AWS consists of over 200 services available on-demand in a pay-as-you-go model., including storage, databases, Big Data, analytics, machine learning, and networking.

There are also several useful services for developers included inside AWS:

• Lambda – A serverless, event-driven computing service that lets you run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without managing your own servers.
• Simple Queue Service (SQS) – A fully managed queue service through which developers can safely send, store, receive, and exchange messages between different software components.
• Event Bridge – Serverless event bus service through which you can deliver real-time data from your own applications, SaaS applications, or AWS services to any other application or service you need (e.g., AWS Lambda).
• API Gateway – The service makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs of any size.
• Amazon EC2 – Service through which users can build a virtual machine (or several) with the operating system and hardware components of their choice.

With so many tools available, businesses of any size or industry can easily build a dedicated tech stack (consisting solely of the AWS tools they need) and then keep adding new tools as they grow.

Going serverless with AWS offers far more benefits than just versatility though.

What are the main benefits of using AWS?

From large companies such as Airbnb, Kelloggs, Pfizer, and Netflix to governmental agencies and financial institutions – all of these organizations are relying on Amazon Web Services nowadays.

However, it’s startups and smaller companies that use AWS services especially often. In fact, most AWS clients are small or midsize companies. So what makes Amazon Web Services useful for all those different companies? Below are just a few benefits to gain when moving to AWS.

Much less hardware needed

In the past, businesses typically stored their data or applications on servers located somewhere inside their offices. That involved finding enough space to store the hardware, buying all necessary equipment, and then installing, configuring, maintaining, and securing the entire server infrastructure.

What’s more, you also needed to have an IT team available to keep the whole system running as it should and to assist with occasional maintenance or upgrading of equipment.

Through Amazon Web Services, on the other hand, businesses can get the tools and resources they need for their work tasks without having to pay upfront for physical servers. Instead, after signing up for AWS and picking the services they need, businesses can use the available tools, storage, and computing power almost immediately.

What’s more, AWS services such as EC2 allow users to build entire virtual machines with exactly the hardware specifications they need – again, without having to pay and then manage their own physical devices.

Cost-effective

Using AWS can also be cheaper than managing on-site servers. Abacus estimates that the average cost of building a server that would be enough for a small business falls between $,1000 and $4,000, plus the costs of installation.

For large businesses that need several high-end servers though, the costs can be far higher – even getting into tens of thousands of dollars, not including maintenance or upgrade costs.

Using cloud services to cover storage or computing power needs instead means there’s no need to buy specialized hardware – everything runs from Amazon’s infrastructure. That alone can save a good part of your budget. Maintenance and security are also on Amazon’s side, so you don’t need a dedicated IT team to manage the servers either.

In addition, all AWS services use pay-as-you-go pricing, so you will only be charged for the actual resources you consume. This way, you can use those services whenever you need them and only pay for the time you spend doing so rather than continually paying to manage physical servers or tools regardless of whether you use them regularly or not.

Flexible

Flexibility is another reason why so many companies turn to AWS. Tech stacks can be built exactly as each business needs it and then upgraded or replaced in no time. What’s more, businesses can also choose which programming languages, hardware, databases, and web applications they want to use together with Amazon’s platform.

And what if you temporarily need more computing power or to add a few new services to your stack? That’s not a problem either – you can add new tools or capabilities in a matter of minutes and just as quickly remove them from your AWS account later.

Multiple regions to choose from

One more aspect to mention when it comes to the flexibility of AWS is that you can pick the region from which you want it to run. A big benefit here is that you don't have to choose the region where you live and work, but any region and availability zone that suits your needs.

For example, let’s say that your company is located in Germany but most of your service or application users live in the USA. To make accessing the service for them faster and smoother, you could pick one of the many availability zones located there rather than Germany or use both zones simultaneously.

What you need to keep in mind, however, is that the number of available features and pricing varies from region to region, so you should compare them before making a choice about which availability zone to use.

Free plans available

It’s also worth noting that several AWS services have “forever free” plans available. For example, AWS Lambda and SQS currently offer one million free requests and messages monthly, while Storage Gateway allows you to use 100 GB of storage space every month for free.

Some of the services also have one-year free trials available. EC2, for example, currently offers 750 hours per month free for a year, while API Gateway offers one million free API calls per month. So, if you aren’t sure whether AWS services are a good choice for your business or not, you can always start with free services first to test them out and only move onto a paid plan once you know which tools you will use regularly.

Can Golang be used together with AWS?

Go is without a doubt one of the fastest-growing languages in the world today. Gaming, media, banking, cloud services, and the ecommerce industry – you can find apps and services built with Go language in all of those sectors. Development tools written in Golang (such as Kubernetes or Docker) are also incredibly popular among developers.

Why are developers and businesses alike so attracted to this programming language? The first reason is that Go code can be compiled incredibly fast straight into machine code. According to a StackOverflow test, 15,000 lines of Go client code can be compiled in only around 1.4 seconds.

Secondly, there are Goroutines – lightweight execution threads managed by Go Runtime that can run together with other processes. Compared to, for example, Java threads that use 1 MB of memory per thread, Goroutines consume only around 2 KB of memory per function. As such developers can easily add thousands or even millions of Goroutines to their applications without risking running out of memory or slowing down the entire application.

Plus, the Go language allows multiple Goroutines to run on a single thread. These traits make the language very efficient at running multiple tasks simultaneously, so it’s a great option for building cloud services or large enterprise platforms that have to handle multiple users at one time.

The third reason for Go’s popularity is that the language is backward-compatible, meaning all applications written in earlier versions of Golang will stay stable after updates.

But can you use Go together with your AWS stack? Absolutely yes – AWS comes with two dedicated tools you can use to build, integrate, and run your Go applications on the platform.

• Go SDK for AWS – Allows you to integrate your Go application with AWS services, including S3, Lambda, SQS, and more.
• AWS IDE Toolkits – A set of open-source plug-ins for Visual Studio Code, GoLand, and IntelliJ IDEA that allows you to create, debug, and deploy applications on Amazon Web Services.

All of these tools also come with detailed documentation, code samples, and tutorials available on the AWS page, plus a dedicated GitHub repository. AWS also has its own service for IaC (Infrastructure as code), CloudFormation, which allows you to manage AWS resources from one place. AWS development tools such as CodeStar for CI/CD also support Go, so you can easily develop applications in this language using them.

Another option you have is to connect to AWS through Terraform, an open-source IaC tool made by Hashicorp and written in Go. Through the platform, you can set up, modify, manage, and remove parts of your AWS (or other supported cloud technology like Azure or Oracle) infrastructure just by creating and then modifying configuration files. Of course, Terraform also has a plugin for Go you can use for development.

How can the Go language lower server costs?

The tiny weight of Goroutines and the speedy compiling time comes with one more benefit – significantly reducing server usage and costs. Thanks to Goroutines, Go applications use much less RAM and CPU than applications written in, for example, Java. The binary size is also usually on the smaller side.

Another of Golang’s features, Garbage Collector, scans applications for any allocated parts of memory that are no longer needed and cleans them to free up memory, so developers don’t need to manage memory manually either. Those features have already enabled a few companies to lower their server costs significantly – Insider Mobile’s developers, for example, used Go to decrease their server load and cost.

This way, the Go language can also reduce the costs of running serverless infrastructure, like AWS, since those platforms bill according to resources used. The fewer resources you use, the less you will therefore have to pay.

🟪 Watch our Golang use cases webiner, where we demonstrate how Go can help you create new products as well as revamp existing ones.

What can our Backend team at Polcode do for you?

As you can see, going serverless with AWS and Golang could save you not only a lot of time (yours and your teams’), but also drastically reduce your server costs. That is because you don’t have to buy the hardware needed for the servers to work and then pay for installation, configuration, and maintenance tasks.

Even better, you can scale your infrastructure up or down as required – for example, to add more computing power when you are working on a large project and then scale back down afterward. You’ll also only be charged for the resources you actually use rather than having to pay for extra computing power or server storage that sits idle, as is often the case with on-site servers.

To confirm that going serverless with AWS will be a good choice for your business and that you’ll be able to save on your budget this way, how about reaching out to our business development team for an opinion? We have developers who are experienced in serverless architecture and AWS onboard, so we’d be able to help you pick the best option to store your applications or data.

If you’re looking for a team of developers that is experienced in building applications with Go and getting the most out of the language, we’d be happy to provide assistance here as well.

Get in touch with us to schedule a meeting so we can learn more about you and the needs of your project.

Conclusion

Going serverless will only become increasingly popular, as it can provide companies flexibility, access to virtually unlimited resources, and most importantly, much lower costs than with in-house servers. Plus, whatever task you need to be completed, AWS probably has a service to make doing so easier, faster, and in most cases, also much cheaper.

Golang, meanwhile, can reduce the load on your servers or the amount of resources you require on AWS. That is thanks to the language being highly efficient and therefore easy on memory and CPU. Either way, you can soon see a visible difference in your server costs.