Author: Michael Blood
Closing your AWS Account
There are a few reasons you may want to close your Amazon Web Services (AWS) Account.
Most of the time it is because you had some level of service with AWS – and now you no longer want these services.
Before you close your account, it may be a good idea to do a survey of all of the services to confirm that they are no longer needed.
The best way to see what you have , is to open the AWS Account – and go to the billing dashboard – and then look through your monthly bill. This helps you identify which services you have, you can use this list to open each of the sections in the AWS Console – select the correct region and review the service.
If you no longer need the service you can delete it.
If you are unsure whether you need it, contact your developer (contact-us)
If you are positive that you are ready to close your AWS Account, you can follow these instructions (these instructions are from this AWS Support Page)
- Sign in as the root user of the account that you want to close, using the email address and password that are associated with the account. If you sign in as an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user or role, you can’t close an account.
- Open the Billing and Cost Management console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home#/.
- On the navigation bar in the upper-right corner, choose your account name (or alias), and then choose My Account.
- On the Account Settings page, scroll to the end of the page to the Close Account section. Read and ensure that you understand the text next to the check boxes. After you close an AWS account, you can no longer use it to access AWS services.
- Select the check boxes to accept the terms, and then choose Close Account.
- In the confirmation box, choose Close Account.
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How Apps Help Businesses
From time management, account management, to money management, apps can help your business in a variety of ways.
Here are 4 Ways Apps Can Help Your Business
- Time Management Apps
Whether it’s tracking your employees’ time or tracking your own, keeping track of tasks can help you save time and money. Let’s break it down.
Let’s say you are a grocery store owner. Each employee in any department has a variety of tasks that they complete each and every day. How long does each of those tasks take? Are they adding value or simply costing your grocery store money?
From the time that an employee clocks in at the main punch-in machine to the time that they punch out, what did they accomplish?
Did they spend a lot of time doing department cleaning? Did they spend a lot of time helping customers find items? How long did your baggers spend collecting carts from the parking lot?
These are all tasks that can be tracked but in most cases they aren’t. The benefits of tracking time are clear and are laid out plainly right here: https://biz30.timedoctor.com/time-tracking-statistics/
They include increased morale, more money saved, and overall a more cohesive team.
2. Account Management Apps
Businesses have thousands of interactions with clients and prospective clients each year. How do you track those interactions? Do you have a paper ledger? Do you use an electronic spreadsheet? These things may work just fine, but using actual account management software could save you time and money.
You receive an email or you find someone that would make a good contact for your company, you then open your ledger or electronic spreadsheet and manually enter all of their data. Before you know it, you’ve spent 5-10 minutes just adding in one contact.
Wouldn’t it be so much better if this process could be automated? Or at least most of the process? Here’s the thing, it can. We use an account manager system that we developed for our own use and it saves so much time. Whenever we get an email from a new contact, that person is automatically added to our contact list. This allows us to easily update newsletters and be able to filter our contacts.
We don’t just swear by account management apps, we live by them.
3. Money Management Apps
If you use a mobile banking app you probably have recognized by now that it automatically sends you updates when you’ve added funds or are low on funds. Wouldn’t it be nice if apps could automatically bill your clients at the press of a button? Well, they can.
Business owners often miss an invoice and fail to bill a client. This often results in lost revenue. Using a money management app that is coded specifically to help you invoice clients can help you make the hard-earned money that you deserve.
4. Security Apps
One of the deterrents of crime nowadays is the installation of cameras and security locks for office buildings. While these are beneficial to keeping unwanted visitors out, they can introduce a headache for people that need access in.
With a security app, you can select who gains access to the building, which doors they get access to you can even give access to the cameras. This can all be done by providing access by job title or credentials. As a business owner, having instant access to your building in the palm of your hand can be extremely helpful and can reduce a lot of unneeded stress.
Having a security app can also help you identify the intruders in the case of a break-in or a once-loyal employee gone rogue.
Thinking of More Ways an App Can Help Your Business?
You may be thinking about how an app can help your business. A great resource for you will be speaking to software developers. Choosing a software developer for any project can be difficult. How do you know if they will be the right person for the job? Will they actually care about your project? How will you know that things are getting done? These are all questions that we answer in the free guide which you can download by clicking the image below.
How Do Apps Work?
What powers an app? Where are apps stored?
So you’ve scrolled through the app store and finally found an app that you want to download. You hit the download button and square with rounded corners appears on your phone’s homepage. You tap the app icon and your app loads. How does this happen? What allows the app to even load? Where is all of the information stored and how does it get updated? These are some of the questions we will try to answer in this blog article, but as always in a way that anyone will be able to understand!
Apps are more than a fancy icon.
If you go into your phone’s settings>storage> It should show you how much space each individual app requires or is using. For example check out this screenshot.
All of the megabytes on the right side of the image are how much storage those apps are using on your device.
You’re probably thinking wow that’s a lot. Actually, no it isn’t. Think about Facebook and consider the fact that there are nearly 3 Billion users. How many videos and pictures do you think there are with that many users? Your little app with 300-400MB of data being used has access to all of that info. But how?
Applications Use Servers to Communicate
Have you heard of AWS? The Cloud? These are tools that enable information to be stored without overloading devices. Let’s start with servers.
Servers are individual computers that can be connected to the internet all day every day.
The Cloud is multiple interconnected computers that talk to eachother remotely.
You’ve probably heard “it’s ran on AWS”. This is essentially Amazon’s Servers. It actually stands for Amazon Web Services. It’s a pay to use cloud computing service.
How Do Apps Talk to Servers?
The answer is API’s, or Application Programming Interfaces. Generally there are four different types of API’s.
- Public- available to anyone to use
- Partner- accessible only when given access by the developer most likely for a client to use
- Internal- a company will use this for their work processes for example a budgeting software the company built
- Composite- a combination of two or more of the above
Put simply API’s allow a computer to operate your app.
Where Do Apps Store All of the Data?
Take a guess as to what database this is.
If you guessed Facebook’s database you are correct! It turns out that all of these macines process 4 Petabytes of data per day (that’s 1,000,000 Gigabytes!)
We’re not going to say that every app out there uses a database like this. However, a lot of apps are powered by AWS. You can find some images of thier database through a Google Search and it is impressive!
Breaking It Down
We know this is a lot of information and it is all very complex. In a nutshell, Programmers (this si to mean developers, coders, app builders, etc.) develop an app and code it to speak to a server. That server then stores information in a database.
If you can learn API’s you will be well on your way to understanding how applications even work. As always we like to keep our information simple and easy to grasp. If you find yourself needing more information about how apps work, feel free to give us a call at 208 344 1115. We’d love to get you in touch with a developer that can explain how all of this works.
If you have more questions about apps be sure to check out our other blog posts where we answer other questions people like you have had about apps and application development!