Comments on: New Amazon Cloud Pricing Signals Market Shift http://www.thevarguy.com/2009/12/15/new-amazon-cloud-pricing-signals-market-shift/ Channel News, Reseller News and Channel Partner Programs Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:00:23 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Jef Spaleta http://www.thevarguy.com/2009/12/15/new-amazon-cloud-pricing-signals-market-shift/comment-page-1/#comment-106383 Jef Spaleta Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:50:34 +0000 http://www.thevarguy.com/?p=6559#comment-106383 1) It's over-hyped. It's introduced a 3rd attractor in the age old centralized server or de-centralized network pendulum swing of IT. The grass is always greener. The first business adopters of cloud services now will be the first ones to shift back to traditional infrastructure in one or two technology cycles. 2) Pundits are not spending enough time talking about security and privacy implications of public clouds as more business look at using pay as you go utility computing services. The potential for cross-image attacks through the host system should scare daylights out of you if you are an EC2 customer and you are doing something more serious than "rendering". I have way to many aws ip addresses sitting in my denyhosts file for attempt to ssh password bruteforce into my systems for my liking...and I'm not even a customer. This issue isn't such a big deal for private on-premises clouds. But on-premises clouds don't scale economically for small to mid sized business like contracting with a public cloud. The real advantages and problems are in the public clouds. 3) We are going to see another ~3 years of growth in utility computing vendors spinning up all sorts of ideas and business models before the first real competition crunch happens and there is a vendor die-off. 4) We won't really know what this crap is best used for until 16 year kids figure out a new use for it that is blindingly obvious in hindsight. 5) Spot pricing scares the absolute crap out of me. Can you imagine if as a consumers we had to deal with spot pricing for all our utilities? For voice and data service? For electricity? For municipal water? I do not like the idea of utility pricing being a whim of instance market demand like the stock or commodity market. Amazon's is basically setting itself up for a price manipulation scandal in the vein of the Enron scandal over the electricity cost in California. -jef 1) It’s over-hyped. It’s introduced a 3rd attractor in the age old centralized server or de-centralized network pendulum swing of IT. The grass is always greener. The first business adopters of cloud services now will be the first ones to shift back to traditional infrastructure in one or two technology cycles.

2) Pundits are not spending enough time talking about security and privacy implications of public clouds as more business look at using pay as you go utility computing services. The potential for cross-image attacks through the host system should scare daylights out of you if you are an EC2 customer and you are doing something more serious than “rendering”. I have way to many aws ip addresses sitting in my denyhosts file for attempt to ssh password bruteforce into my systems for my liking…and I’m not even a customer. This issue isn’t such a big deal for private on-premises clouds. But on-premises clouds don’t scale economically for small to mid sized business like contracting with a public cloud. The real advantages and problems are in the public clouds.

3) We are going to see another ~3 years of growth in utility computing vendors spinning up all sorts of ideas and business models before the first real competition crunch happens and there is a vendor die-off.

4) We won’t really know what this crap is best used for until 16 year kids figure out a new use for it that is blindingly obvious in hindsight.

5) Spot pricing scares the absolute crap out of me. Can you imagine if as a consumers we had to deal with spot pricing for all our utilities? For voice and data service? For electricity? For municipal water? I do not like the idea of utility pricing being a whim of instance market demand like the stock or commodity market. Amazon’s is basically setting itself up for a price manipulation scandal in the vein of the Enron scandal over the electricity cost in California.

-jef

]]> By: The VAR Guy http://www.thevarguy.com/2009/12/15/new-amazon-cloud-pricing-signals-market-shift/comment-page-1/#comment-106374 The VAR Guy Wed, 16 Dec 2009 03:22:16 +0000 http://www.thevarguy.com/?p=6559#comment-106374 Jef: What's your take on all the cloud noise? Is the media (The VAR Guy included) hyping the market too much or do you see some practical, real-world opportunities ahead? -TVG Jef: What’s your take on all the cloud noise? Is the media (The VAR Guy included) hyping the market too much or do you see some practical, real-world opportunities ahead?
-TVG

]]> By: Jef Spaleta http://www.thevarguy.com/2009/12/15/new-amazon-cloud-pricing-signals-market-shift/comment-page-1/#comment-106368 Jef Spaleta Tue, 15 Dec 2009 23:52:13 +0000 http://www.thevarguy.com/?p=6559#comment-106368 The instance termination of an instance I think is going to be problematic. I think Amazon is going to have to implement some sort of shutdown notification with a minimum timeout and give instance some way to look for an impending shutdown and do end of instance clean up. It's not any different than having a system sitting on a UPS and wanting to do a clean shutdown on power failure. Expecting every instance to save state continuously is a bit ridiculous that would require people to re-engineer virtual instances differently from normal EC-2 to be spot pricing ready. You don't want to waste time and cpu cycles saving internal state unncessarily even if your crunching scientific calculations. Providing 1 to 5 minutes of pollable warning facility like an external UPS typically does seems far more reasonable and would be useful for general purpose EC2 instance as well. -jef The instance termination of an instance I think is going to be problematic. I think Amazon is going to have to implement some sort of shutdown notification with a minimum timeout and give instance some way to look for an impending shutdown and do end of instance clean up.

It’s not any different than having a system sitting on a UPS and wanting to do a clean shutdown on power failure. Expecting every instance to save state continuously is a bit ridiculous that would require people to re-engineer virtual instances differently from normal EC-2 to be spot pricing ready. You don’t want to waste time and cpu cycles saving internal state unncessarily even if your crunching scientific calculations.

Providing 1 to 5 minutes of pollable warning facility like an external UPS typically does seems far more reasonable and would be useful for general purpose EC2 instance as well.

-jef

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