The notion of an individual computer disappears with the infrastructure as a service cloud computing model as does the decades old approach linking software sales to physical computers. The early attempts at software pricing in a cloud environment do not look promising. Amazon EC2 scales the fee for Windows in direct proportion to the instance [...]
I am troubled by the failure to find a single cloud critic during a six month immersion in the cloud ecosystem. I have yet to hear of a single large scale cloud deployment disaster. The several and growing cloud conferences have an eerie Jim Jones everyone loves cloud vibe. This seems odd given the supposed [...]
The 10x difference in pricing between the least and most expensive cloud computing offers listed on the Cloud Price Calculator home page reflects an industry in pricing chaos. The long list of issues associated with sessions at the various cloud conferences from security to picking a hypervisor remain moot until the industry becomes more price [...]
Cloud computing represents the latest in a series of concessions to the limits of scaling computer performance. Multi-threading, multi-cores, multi-processor, and now multi-server solutions arise as compromises in the search for ever more powerful compute platforms. Multi-anything represents a compromise, because it forces partitioning compute tasks. Decomposing compute tasks to take advantage of parallelism is [...]
Amazon’s ability to leave the price of the original single ECU instance unchanged in the four years since the launch of EC2 suggests they missed the Moore’s Law memo. In particular, Amazon’s success owes to the invention of the ECU as a new measure of compute capacity that clouds (pun intended) competitive comparisons. Amazon’s Definition [...]
