May I ask, why is this approach more recent these days? Is AWS acting something like a CMS(wordpress,blogspot) now?
What are the pros and cons?
Good that you asked. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is currently the one of the largest cloud providers in the industry today, and also the most prominent leader as reported in Gartner (source:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/...icrosoft_are_the_cloud_leaders_by_a_fair_way/). You do have Microsoft Azure trailing closely behind and followed by Google Cloud.
Basically AWS is an extremely large Infrastructure-As-A-Service(IaaS) provider, analogous to data centre, with its business spanning across the global and across multiple data centres situated all over the world. Microsoft Azure and other cloud providers works in similar fashion with differences to services offered and scale.
AWS is well suited in SME having that it provides a Pay-As-You-Go(PAYG) costing model as well as a very responsive, near realtime deployment process. For smaller businesses, upfront cost are often hefty investment, which business tries to avoid. SO the PAYG costing model helps to turn CAPEX into OBEX which allows SME to attempt into big solution deployment projects.
In the past, businesses would need to procure infrastructures hosted in one or more data centres. You need to procure racks, switches, load balancers, firewalls, servers, hard disks, tape backups, patch panels, KVMs, cabling services and more. All these requires either competent engineers, and/or engaging with vendors via professional services to get them installed and tested. The process is rather laborious which makes hosting companies later provides virtual servers or managed servers to help with SME. However the turn around time normally isn't immediate or you have also limited services from these early days managed services.
Hence some years (slightly over a decade) back, cloud providers suddenly spawn out from major hosting companies such as Rackspace, Linode, so forth. Microsoft, AWS, Google ain't hosting companies, but because of their existing infrastructure hosting their services, they went into the cloud provider businesses too, having they are capable of providing managed services by further beefing up their infrastructure.
Years later today, mature cloud providers like AWS, Azure and GCE provided an assorted range of managed services from Computing Nodes, Database(SQL & NoSQL & Document/Object) Managed Services, DNS, Encoding, AI and Data Processing Compute services, Security Managed Services and more.
As a small or large business, now you don't need to spend a lead-time of maybe weeks to months procuring infrastructures from vendors, and then another couple of weeks or months to install your OS and software and get your hardware in place. You simply just sign up to their services with a credit card or payment agreement, log in to these cloud providers web management console, and in a couple clicks and waiting time in minutes or hours, you can potentially deploy your solution that span across data centres and the world.
I won't go into the Pros and Cons, which you can further research on your own or others to provide in this thread. Probably one of the main disadvantage that are mostly surrounding cloud providers will be Security, which in my opinion are mostly greatly misunderstood when you just take it without context. In actual fact, when you architect your solution properly, you may actually get more security hosting in mature cloud providers than having it in your own premises or 3rd party local, manually managed, data centres
Ask more if you would like to know more. In short AWS is a much larger thing than a software CMS.
