Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

AWS EC2 (Amazon Elastic Cloud 2) is a widely used example of an IaaS cloud computing model, Whether you’re looking for pure compute power, content delivery services, storage space, or other service functionality. It is known for comprehensive security capabilities, scalability, backup and storage services, system monitoring capabilities and prominent disaster recovery. It is also capable to serve hybrid cloud solutions across AWS and on-premises environments.

The Amazon EC2 has multiple ready-configured instance types to be used building own cloud infrastructure and fit different use cases. For curiosity, here are the listed A1-instances optimized for cost and performance for scalable workloads:

Amazon EC2 A1 instances deliver significant cost savings for scale-out and Arm-based applications such as web servers, containerized microservices, caching fleets, and distributed data stores that are supported by the extensive Arm ecosystem. A1 instances are the first EC2 instances powered by AWS Graviton Processors that feature 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores and custom silicon designed by AWS. These instances will also appeal to developers, enthusiasts, and educators across the Arm developer community. Most architecture-agnostic applications that can run on Arm cores could also benefit from A1 instances.

The Arm architecture is pervasive across the Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, automotive, embedded and robotics applications due to its optimized price/performance. For example, several customers use Arm to implement cost effective, high throughput, networking, and security on-premises. Arm software developers have historically had limited access to cost effective, on-demand and scalable capacity resulting in inefficient build and test coverage compromises. To address these challenges, teams often resort to building with cross-compilation and testing in emulation which typically leads to increased development times. For Arm developers, A1 instances provide the ideal platform to build and test on native Arm hardware. Cost effective, on-demand, and scalable capacity enables a full CI/CD pipeline, increasing developer productivity, improving product quality, and reducing time to market. ref

The picture below shows the A1 instances listed at July 2020 by https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/a1/

Picture 6. Amazon A1 instances.

This is just one of the instance types provided by Amazon, but it already has a great variety of choices for IaaS type of needs.