Slack And its AWS Services
Hello everyone, well I hope you all are doing great! This article is about the slack cloud computing and how it uses the AWS for maintaining its communication services.
What is cloud computing?
Simply put, cloud computing is the delivery of computing services—including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence—over the Internet (“the cloud”) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale. We typically pay only for cloud services we use, helping lower operating costs, run infrastructure more efficiently and scale as business needs change.
What are the benefits of cloud computing?
Cost
Cloud computing eliminates the capital expense of buying hardware and software and setting up and running on-site data centers—the racks of servers, the round-the-clock electricity for power and cooling, the IT experts for managing the infrastructure. It adds up fast.
Speed
Most cloud computing services are provided self service and on demand, so even vast amounts of computing resources can be provisioned in minutes, typically with just a few mouse clicks, giving businesses a lot of flexibility and taking the pressure off capacity planning.
Global scale
The benefits of cloud computing services include the ability to scale elastically. In cloud speak, that means delivering the right amount of IT resources—for example, more or less computing power, storage, bandwidth—right when it is needed and from the right geographic location.
Productivity
On-site data centers typically require a lot of “racking and stacking”—hardware setup, software patching, and other time-consuming IT management chores. Cloud computing removes the need for many of these tasks, so IT teams can spend time on achieving more important business goals.
Performance
The biggest cloud computing services run on a worldwide network of secure datacenters, which are regularly upgraded to the latest generation of fast and efficient computing hardware. This offers several benefits over a single corporate datacenter, including reduced network latency for applications and greater economies of scale.
Reliability
Cloud computing makes data backup, disaster recovery and business continuity easier and less expensive because data can be mirrored at multiple redundant sites on the cloud provider’s network.
Security
Many cloud providers offer a broad set of policies, technologies and controls that strengthen your security posture overall, helping protect your data, apps and infrastructure from potential threats.
Types of cloud computing
Public cloud: Public clouds are owned and operated by a third-party cloud service providers, which deliver their computing resources like servers and storage over the Internet. Microsoft Azure is an example of a public cloud. With a public cloud, all hardware, software and other supporting infrastructure is owned and managed by the cloud provider. You access these services and manage your account using a web browser.
Private cloud: A private cloud refers to cloud computing resources used exclusively by a single business or organisation. A private cloud can be physically located on the company’s on-site data center. Some companies also pay third-party service providers to host their private cloud. A private cloud is one in which the services and infrastructure are maintained on a private network.
Hybrid cloud : Hybrid clouds combine public and private clouds, bound together by technology that allows data and applications to be shared between them. By allowing data and applications to move between private and public clouds, a hybrid cloud gives your business greater flexibility, more deployment options and helps optimize your existing infrastructure, security and compliance.
What is slack?
Slack is a channel-based messaging platform. With Slack, people can work together more effectively, connect all their software tools and services and find the information that they need to do their best work – all within a secure, enterprise-grade environment.A Slack workspace is made up of channels, where team members can communicate and work together. Keep reading to learn about four key features of Slack.
The San Francisco–based company, which launched its eponymous app in February 2014, was started by a small group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs that include Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield. Privately-held Slack is on Fortune Magazine’s “Unicorn List” of startup firms worth $1 billion or more, with a $2.8 billion valuation supported by a five percent weekly user growth rate and major brand-name customers.
Slack is a messaging platform that includes a variety of communication services, such as Twitter, Dropbox, GitHub or Google Docs. It has gained followers very quickly in the mere 18 months since it was launched: more than one million daily users, of which 300,000 pay for the service.
With traditional IT, it would take weeks or months to contend with hardware lead times to add more capacity. Using AWS, we can look at user metrics weekly or daily and react with new capacity in 30 seconds." -Richard Crowley,Director of Operations, Slack
Challenges
In the age of the unicorn startups, Slack has drawn attention for its meteoric rise and potential for disrupting traditional business communications tools, particularly email. By June 2015—less than 18 months after its launch—the company already had more than 1.1 million daily users, 300,000 paid seats, and more than 30 million messages flowing through Slack each week via integrations with other services.
Slack’s founders had already learned hard lessons from previous failed ventures. One of those was the importance of picking the right IT infrastructure to run the business. If Slack was to succeed in a fiercely competitive business-software marketplace, its founders knew they would need a lean staff, low costs, and above all an IT environment capable of supporting speed, agility, and innovation. Going to the cloud was the logical choice.
“The realities of physical space, hardware acquisition, replacement parts, running a server facility with all its costs—all the physical manifestations that can lead to breakages—made a traditional IT environment impractical for an Internet startup,” says Richard Crowley, Slack’s director of operations. “Plus we would have needed an extra layer of expertise just to run the infrastructure. We could have operated with that kind of IT infrastructure, but the cost and complexity would have made it much harder to launch the business.”
Why did Slack decide to use Amazon Web Services?
Amazon Web Services(AWS), is a service platform in the cloud that, among other possible functions, allows users to store databases and exchange content within an interface.
Slack architecture is based on various services offered by AWS. It uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2, to calculate tasks between users. A web service that provides developers with scalable computing in the cloud based on the website.
To run file uploading of both active and inactive users, Slack uses Elastic Load Balancing, which automatically distributes incoming application traffic between several Amazon EC2 instances. And to provide greater security, it uses Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, which manages security groups and the firewall rules. To control user credentials, Slack uses AWS Identity and Access Management.
How has Slack improved?
By using Amazon Web Services, Slack has achieved a very flexible platform that is prepared for innovation and response capabilities, providing its users with reliability and security to ensure confidentiality of the information shared among them.
The accumulation of resources in the cloud provided by AWS allows Slack to simulate disaster recovery so it can ensure its users that their information will always be available and accessible. In other words, Amazon Web Services provides consistency, a feature that is crucial for a platform such as Slack.
Slack improves its security by using services in the cloud : Flexibility, consistency and security are some of the features that Slack has been able to implement in its interface by choosing the cloud services available in Amazon Web Services. Slack says it uses AWS for its "processing and delivery infrastructure."
Slack architecture is quite simple and based on the Amazon Web Services:
Amazon S3 :Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.
Amazon EC2: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud.
Elastic Load Balancing: Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, and Lambda functions.
Amazon EBS: Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is an easy to use, high performance block storage service designed for use with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
Benefits of AWS
- Reviews user metrics daily
- Reacts to usage rates in a matter of seconds by provisioning additional capacity
- Easily practices disaster-recovery scenarios.
We conclude About AWS!!
Why AWS as cloud service :Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 175 fully featured services from data centers globally. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.
We conclude about SLACK using AWS!!
Using AWS as its IT infrastructure has helped Slack achieve an astonishing growth rate and a multi billion-dollar valuation with a platform that supports speed of innovation and responsiveness, reliability, and security features to ensure the confidentiality of customer information.
