The distributed services technological world now requires a global scope, and users think about the cloud as a service provider; no matter where they are physically located, they need to be able to access their information at any time, wherever they are. The cloud market demands infrastructure so robust that it allows an increasing number of users to consume information efficiently.
Data centers have a fixed capacity, and this represents a restriction on the amount of resources available; you will not be able to provision more resources beyond the last rack available in the physical facilities.
"This means that the next server will cost 10M because you will need to buy a new data center"
- Jon Jenkins “Velocity Culture” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxk8b9rSKOo)
Service clouds offer elastic services that in some way abstract this problem. In the year 2000, Amazon was dealing with big issues pertaining to the scaling of their infrastructure, which led to the creation of strategies that could support this hyper growth, and the result was the basis of what is now Amazon Web Services (AWS). During this time, AWS has learned a lot from its experience, as it is not an easy endeavor to pioneer a new market and remain an industry leader.
"So very quietly around 2000, we became a services company with really no fanfare."
- Andy Jassy, AWS CEO (https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/02/andy-jassys-brief-history-of-the-genesis-of-aws/)
At the time of the writing of this book, AWS has 15 geographic regions and a total of 54 Availability Zones and three private regions; one in the US (GovCloud) and two more in China (Beijing and Ningxia). So, AWS is positioned as the cloud provider with the most significant infrastructure in the world when it comes to data centers.