Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Sunday April 20 2014, @09:29AM   Printer-friendly

I've used both the Amazon EC2 infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) as well as the Google App Engine platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and while there are pros and cons for each both have been worth the money spent.

Recently Google dropped prices on their virtual servers in order to stay more competitive with Amazon, which caused Amazon to drop their prices and so on. The battle is ramping up between Amazon, Google, and Microsoft for cloud supremacy.

Christopher Mims at QUARTZ suggests that the focus on rent-able virtual servers and services is going to be a major component of these companies business and the internet in the near future:

"... in cloud computing Google is playing catch-up with a single market leader, Amazon, that has a track record of destroying incumbents in every industry it gets into. What Google has in its favor, besides a sheer technical expertise, is that it already runs the biggest cloud-computing operation in the world just that it puts most of it to a different use. The resulting battle is likely to be epic, and its outcome determines nothing less than who will control the internet."

In-house servers and services are not going away but with the cheap prices, low investment of renting a virtual machine, and ease of finding people who have worked with a particular platform I can see many people and companies going all in with Google, Amazon, or Microsoft. Now if only we could get them to agree on a standard so we could easily port from one service to another... HA!

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 20 2014, @10:01AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 20 2014, @10:01AM (#33561)

    if only we could get them to agree on a standard

    EC2 is the standard, and Eucalyptus is a free open source clone of EC2. Eucalyptus is Not EC2, like GNU's Not Unix.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 10 2014, @01:11AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 10 2014, @01:11AM (#41446)

      There will be one of the overall Japaneseese insurance companies to survive and grow revenues.With this in March., biggest online casino [onlinecasi...iazone.com], [url="http://onlinecasinoaustraliazone.com/ "]biggest online casino[/url], 237951,

  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 20 2014, @10:27AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 20 2014, @10:27AM (#33565)

    oh my!

    • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 20 2014, @10:55AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 20 2014, @10:55AM (#33574)

      select OpenHole insert FreeDick

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 20 2014, @11:05AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 20 2014, @11:05AM (#33576)

        "FreeDick"
        Stallman?

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by kramulous on Sunday April 20 2014, @12:53PM

    by kramulous (255) on Sunday April 20 2014, @12:53PM (#33590)

    Google needs to put together an API that makes the hardware programmable. That is what makes Amazon so powerful (most languages).

    Use compatible APIs and you have real competition.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by opinionated_science on Sunday April 20 2014, @01:42PM

    by opinionated_science (4031) on Sunday April 20 2014, @01:42PM (#33594)

    The cloud providers are charging a premium for having resources out of your control.

    For this to be useful, it should be slightly cheaper than buying the kit and running it yourself.

    Of course domestic costs are far lower than corporate costs and that is why cloud has seen some growth, accounting for corporation inefficiencies.

    But just looking at Google's latest price drop, I did a back of the envelope calculation that it was $300/1TB/year. The data is backed up, but still not compelling.

    It would appear that the economies of scale have not reached their apex yet, my estimate is approx a factor of 3X overpriced... Anybody else have pricing experieinces?

    • (Score: 1) by isaac on Sunday April 20 2014, @04:35PM

      by isaac (500) on Sunday April 20 2014, @04:35PM (#33637)

      Of course domestic costs are far lower than corporate costs and that is why cloud has seen some growth, accounting for corporation inefficiencies.

      But just looking at Google's latest price drop, I did a back of the envelope calculation that it was $300/1TB/year. The data is backed up, but still not compelling.

      It would appear that the economies of scale have not reached their apex yet, my estimate is approx a factor of 3X overpriced... Anybody else have pricing experieinces?

      In the case of storage, the cloud market *is* the commodity market. That's where the big 3.5" drives go these days - not your Packard Bell. How many drives and what server and network infrastructure does it take to achieve eleventy-nines of durability and, say, four-nines of availability from anywhere in the world via the internet*? (hint: "it's backed up" is a naive approach.)

      If all you care about is a durable off-site, off-line backup, or an on-site and on-line storage pool (i.e. it's not important that you be able to store and retrieve data over the internet,) you can do that cheaply. Online remote storage starts to cost money - good luck implementing something as durable and available as S3 or Google Cloud Storage for less than it costs to just pay AWS or Google, even if you value your time at $0.

      -Isaac

      * - not valid in mainland China.

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by edIII on Sunday April 20 2014, @10:15PM

      by edIII (791) on Sunday April 20 2014, @10:15PM (#33744)

      I did calculate EC2 a few years ago and what I found was that it cost me around $900 a month to operate a server with the same features I was getting (more or less) with XenServer and ZFS. That assumed 100% usage of the server 24/7. Not 100% on the CPU, just always running in idle at a minimum of 10%.

      At over 10k per year per server it was a pretty bad deal. Also factor in EC2's known problems with security. The number of VOIP attacks I have received in the last couple of years coming from EC2 is quite high. Let's just say bad neighborhood. I couldn't reasonably expect that my IP address ranges were very respectable in the eyes of business elsewhere. At the time a lot of sysadmins were saying they blocked everything coming from EC2 that was SIP.

      It makes sense for small outfits that need to grow organically and can't afford spending an initial 30-40k on hardware, and don't have sysadmins on staff to keep it up and running. Now, if you already had 100k in equipment and 5k+ monthly bill for colocation, EC2 just made no sense at all. Especially considering that when those people on EC2 *really* needed that redundancy across multiple data centers to work it failed spectacularly.

      I remember that once I had everything written down and calculated that EC2 was not a good deal at all. Just a waste of money. EC2 is a marketing buzzword really and other than clueless execs pushing for it since they saw something shiny in a business magazine, corporations are not going to switch over to it. At least not until EC2 drops the price somewhat (at least from what it was when I checked). Once everything is said and done, you spend less money buying the equipment and hiring your own staff.

      That being said, if you have ZERO equipment at the moment and need to get up and running with something, EC2 is exactly where I would send you. The sweet spot for EC2 is startups and use cases that will never really go over 5-10 servers.

      If you have 200 servers and you're on EC2 you might as well be setting fire to your money.

      --
      Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 20 2014, @05:25PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 20 2014, @05:25PM (#33655)

    You should have an exit strategy if you're thinking of using cloud services for things that are harder to migrate/rebuild than simple/small sites/apps.

    1) Data Migration - getting terabytes or even petabytes of stuff out (or in):
    Amazon has: http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/ [amazon.com]
    Windows Azure has: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/art icles/storage-import-export-service/ [microsoft.com]
    Google has Import only (and it's experimental): https://developers.google.com/storage/docs/early-a ccess [google.com]

    Amazon's details are more confidence inspiring than Windows Azure's - it looks like a service that's has actually been successfully used by more than a few customers.
    http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/details/ [amazon.com]
    For example:

    Each AWS Import/Export station is capable of loading data at over 100MB per second, but in most cases the rate of the data load will be bounded by a combination of the read or write speed of your device and, for Amazon S3 data loads, the average object size. Selecting devices with faster read or write speeds and interfaces can reduce data loading time. For more details regarding data loading performance see the AWS Import/Export Calculator

    In contrast - Windows Azure's page says this:

    How long will it take to import or export my data?
    It will take the time to ship the disks, plus several hours per TB of data to copy the data.

    2) App Migration - Will your cloud apps work elsewhere?
    There's EC2 compatible stuff:
    http://www.stackgeek.com/blog/kordless/post/compar ison-of-open-source-cloud-support-for-ec2 [stackgeek.com]
    http://cloudstack.apache.org/docs/en-US/Apache_Clo udStack/4.0.2/html/Installation_Guide/aws-ec2-intr oduction.html [apache.org]
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucalyptus_(software) [wikipedia.org]

    There's apparently Google Cloud compatible stuff:
    http://www.appscale.com/ [appscale.com]

    Anyone know of Windows Azure platform compatible stuff?

    Of course, if you use a pure VM mode then you can migrate off (whether it's Azure or Amazon), but you may end up redoing a lot of the cloud stuff - scaling, queues, etc.