

Taking on Amazon, Google launches EC2 rival Compute Engine - hrayr
http://gigaom.com/cloud/taking-on-amazon-google-launches-compute-on-demand-rival-to-ec2/

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aaronsw
Hmm, looks like they're competing directly on price:

1 virtual core, 1.7GB RAM, 160GB disk for $.055/hr (Google)

1 virtual core, 1.7GB RAM, 160GB disk for $.08/hr (Amazon)

Amazon is still much cheaper if you use reserved instances or spot pricing,
though. And for these sorts of compute jobs, I'm not sure why you wouldn't use
spot pricing.

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ChuckMcM
This is part of what I find amazing. Google and Amazon and every other 'EC'
vendor looks to 'lock in' the price per 'equivalent compute unit'. What that
means is that when Intel gets 50% more performance the EC vendor gets 50% more
profit as they don't lower their price. For a user of cloud services it means
that your cost to deliver your product will only go 'up' with features. In the
past a large number of players have been able to deliver additional features
at the same cost because they just upgraded to faster hardware.

The economics of this move starts pouring dollars into the EC providers and
puts upward price pressure on web services. This 'price ratchet', if widely
adopted, it going to put a huge kink in the productivity gains we've seen over
the last 10 years as folks have ridden the commodity compute bandwagon. We've
seen previews of that when people who used AppEngine got bit by the big price
increases. Its like commuters who are forced to give up their income to the
the gas pump, elastic compute resources are the 'gas' of the 21st century.

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genwin
Hopefully competitive forces will sort that out. There will be an incentive
for price per 'equivalent compute unit' to be lowered as the underlying
infrastructure costs decrease.

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ChuckMcM
I think the competitive forces will have some bearing here, although gas
prices are an example of something which gets regulatory barriers put in place
of expansion (you can't easily get approval to build a refinery). Given the
'cyber war' type mentality I am keeping a close eye on the regulatory
environment growing up around providing 'cloud' services, be they compute,
storage, or web front ends.

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hoodoof
Thank goodness for competition. Now maybe we'll see better performance from
Amazon EC2 servers. A return to Moore's law maybe.

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mtgx
Why is Apple's iCloud being mentioned in the same sentence with Compute Engine
and EC2? That's like putting Google Drive in there, too.

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hrayr
Right, and they conveniently forgot to mention Rackspace. I highly doubt Apple
is going to release a direct competitor to EC2 or the like; unless they can
turn a service into a consumer product, Apple is not going to waste their time
with it.

