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 [...]
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 [...]
