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 [...]
Some argue a consensus measure of compute resources represents a long standing and unfulfilled utopian dream. The “MIPS” seems like an existence proof and served this purpose in the 80′s and early 90′s. Processors eventually got more complicated with multiple cores and various performance enhancement strategies. The issue is not only not utopian, it a [...]
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 [...]
The CloudPriceCalculator uses a simple index to compare infrastructure as a service cloud computing offers. The Cloud Price Normalization (CPN) index adds compute, memory, storage, bandwidth, and divides by price. CPN reflects the quantity of cloud resources that one can buy for $1000 USD. The CPN table includes offers from six different vendors with CPN’s [...]
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 [...]
