Cloud Computing Economics

Cloud computing is a method to get customers to tu...

2011-08-22T01:10:19.619-04:00

Cloud computing is a method to get customers to turnover corporate data to a company they know nothing about. 5-10 years from now the cloud companies will have gather massive repository of data to analysis and sell to whom ever they please i.e. big government, competitors… 5-10 years cloud computing will be free (the cloud companies will gladly pay you to turn over your data to them for analysis)

It’s also a one stop shop for hackers, kind’a like going to the mall all the companies are under one roof.

But for now All companies are at the learning point and focusing simply on how to interact with the cloud company using SOAP, REST learning new API’s…But in the other hand the cloud company are sorting and categorizing your payload. Crazy stuff
All the dots will start connecting in 5-10 years…enjoy

@Sridar: Again, speaking as a technical architect ...

2011-07-23T11:44:29.748-04:00

@Sridar: Again, speaking as a technical architect working for a Fortune 500 company, I'm not sure I agree with your assertion that these building blocks aren't sophisticated enough for many business problems. Rather, I agree that people simply aren't used to designing applications with this types of building blocks in mind.

Case in point: you have a need to run in multiple datacenters due either to geographic locality or purely for high availability reasons. The CAP theorem says that you can't guarantee availability and consistency at the same time here; many of the cloud building blocks don't give you strong consistency guarantees (e.g. transactions), but you've already gone down that road anyway once you've built a distributed system (assuming that availability is more important that strict consistency, which it usually is).

I think this will eventually sort itself out in the market; vendors and software companies that use these techniques will enjoy faster times to market and economies of scale and hence will drive out those who don't understand these techniques through pure economic Darwinism. Evolve or perish.

hi Good arguments, the question is probably how ...

2011-07-22T06:55:09.281-04:00

hi

Good arguments, the question is probably how many of today's cloud users and IT departments are considering using these application building blocks directly.

They would prefer to leave this problem to the application vendors, do these people see cloud based application blocks answering their application development needs ?

While addressing some problems (scaling, replication) they arent sophisticated enough for many business problems or the current levels of application design havent got around to thinking of solutions with these building blocks as "legos".

Tks
g s

2010-01-20T07:39:30.076-05:00

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

As a software architect who has built and deployed...

2009-08-19T22:56:38.659-04:00

As a software architect who has built and deployed Internet scale (10 million UV a month) web applications both in company-hosted data centers and using infrastructure-as-a-service (Amazon Web Services) and platform-as-a-service (Google App Engine) offerings, it's no hoax.

At least in that setting, the ease of deployment and scale is unmatched. I can build in a week what used to take months.

And, for what it's worth, most consumer workloads (which are becoming increasingly dominated by browser use) are not CPU-bound; they are network-bound. The last mile hurts. Even with advancing CPU power, there are still things we have to do server side because the Javascript engines in the browsers can't keep up.

For sure netbooks will be great, but I don't think that Cloud Computing in the sense I'm discussing here is really targeted at the consumer; it's targeted at software development companies. So I'm pretty sure both will have fine niches in the marketplace.

Cloud Computing is a marketing scam like the "...

2009-08-18T00:14:56.197-04:00

Cloud Computing is a marketing scam like the "paperless office". Talk the customers into wanting it and then figure out how to make money off them with it.

We are bombarded with dis-info that netbooks aren't powerful enough for REAL COMPUTING. They are 3 times as powerful as the IBM 3033 mainframe that cost $3,000,000 in 1980 and netbooks have 32 times as much memory. 160 gigabytes of on-line storage in 1980. Who had that? It's just that no one was trying to store movies on their computer in 1980.

We need higher quality information and less BS not cloud computing.

www.netbookation.com/netbkbnch.htm

@Eric: thanks for the comment. You are absolutely ...

2009-02-14T11:21:00.000-05:00

@Eric: thanks for the comment. You are absolutely right that there is a difference between racking and maintaining hardware (the servers) and deploying and managing the software that runs on them. Hardware only accounts for 7% of server TCO.

My previous post on hardware deployment learning curves suggests that cloud computing vendors have a massive cost advantage over an in-home datacenter on this front. However, infrastructure-as-a-service vendors like AWS don't free you from that second phase--managing what software is running where.

Platform-as-a-service offerings like Google App Engine, Mor.ph, and others actually free you from a lot of traditional operating activities (and costs), so in my mind they are even more compelling solutions.

When the title of your article came up in my searc...

2009-02-11T12:51:00.000-05:00

When the title of your article came up in my search, my first thought was "oh, finally someone's discussing the elephant in the livingroom about Cloud Computing!" but it wasn't to be.

Cloud computing provides operational cost transparency in another way: by lumping all the operations costs into a single number (with the exception of deployment and management labor, which often incorrectly assumed to be much lower with cloud deployments.)

As a cloud vendor, what I run into most often is that people shop on price, but are comparing apples to oranges: they compare our service (or Amazon) to buying a server or to colocation. Yet buying a server doesn't represent operations costs at all: it's only the first of many. Colocation also doesn't represent them well because again the costs focus on the servER rather than the servICE. This is why, if you shop on price alone, Cloud always loses out. It also means that Cloud vendors have some education to do around accounting for operations costs. I know I spend at least 75% of my sales effort on education, often in the form of business consulting for my potential customers.

Those who choose cloud either see a critical requirement being met by its unique features, or they understand the cost structures of the alternatives well enough to see that there is an economic advantage to choosing a cloud deployment despite its apparently higher price.

-Eric Novikoff
ENKI
http://www.computingutility.com/