Amazon Web Services...why its good for SOCIY

Your website is out there. It looks great (..maybe not), it functions perfectly (..maybe not), and it’s the best version of itself. That is all “fine and dandy”, but what happens when you have a rush of users during a busy season? Can your servers handle the traffic? What happens when your user base grows? Does your security keep up? Does your team spend entirely too much time worrying about these things? How quickly can you address these changing environments?

I’m giving myself a minor stress attack just typing these questions, and that is why we use Amazon Web Services (AWS) for our SOCIY platform.

“Using AWS allows us to grow and meet customer needs as fast as we need to. We never have to wait for a server or a network connection to arrive in the UPS truck.” - Kerry Knopp, DevOps Engineer at SOCIY

This quote is a fantastic summation from our friend on why AWS rocks. Let’s expound upon his statement and walk through a few reasons why AWS is good for our SOCIY community.

Scalability

Your YMCA has its ebbs and flows, it’s busy season and not-so busy season (<- yeah right!), and the packed calendar just keeps revolving. A similar traffic flow happens with your website. Traffic is never constant - it has its peaks and valleys. AWS allows us to follow this demand elasticity automatically and efficiently.

Rewind the clock a few years and most businesses did not have this luxury. In order to handle an increase in scale it required multiple phone calls, hours of meetings, and weeks/months to have servers ordered and delivered on-site. Now, AWS takes care of much of this overhead within minutes. Whatever capacity is needed at any point in time, it will be there for us and for your YMCA.

Security

It’s secure, right? Yes it is. Because AWS is a “web service”, on-site risks are kept to a minimum. And, security in the cloud is recognized as being superior to on-site solutions. Rather than being solely responsible for security ourselves, AWS serves to share the responsibility with us. They do so by taking care of the physical security of their facilities as well as their infrastructure. The infrastructure they are responsible for includes database, storage, networking, and compute resources. Essentially, they take care of everything our platform (software, data, etc.) sits on top of. Pretty cool!

Also, in connecting this with the scalability feature AWS brings to the table, security in the cloud brings a similar elasticity. It does not matter how many YMCA partners we have and how much bandwidth each requires, the AWS infrastructure is designed to scale with our cloud usage and keep data safe.

Innovation

Remember Kerry’s quote at the beginning? Of course you do. No waiting for servers - that jazz. Well, he nailed it on the head. That little fact saves us so much time each day/week/month that is difficult to quantify. All of the time saved from discussing hosting needs and requirements affords us and our YMCA’s more time and freedom to continue platform innovation. And, when that new feature is ready for deployment, we can simply push it out to our partners without worrying about whether we have the bandwidth or not. It’s there, and it’s a wonderful thing!

AWS is a foundational tool that allows us all to move…

Forward Together