On Demand Software Scrum

Somehow I missed this article when it came out in Business Week. It is really about how many companies are looking to deliver their solutions via the internet with Microsoft, Oracle and SAP leading the way.

Amazon's Utility Infrastructure is now complete

Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos, spoke at the recent MIT Emerging Technologies Conference. In his talk he unveiled their new EC2 initiative. This complements their S3 Web Services and platform and rounds out a complete compute infrastructure for utility computing.

To me the pricing is quite attractive, $.10/CPU/hour, $.20/GB bandwidth, $.15/GB storage billable monthly. It is still a little bit more expensive than a dedicated server that you could purchase from ServerBeach, but that is assuming you run the ServerBeach server at 100% utilization and use all of the allocated bandwidth each month.

However, when you consider that most machines are run at around 10% capacity then the Amazon Pricing becomes much more attractive. The only trouble I have is finding out how to normalize the CPU pricing. Bandwidth and diskspace have a consistent meaning, CPU doesn't.

For Utility Computing to take off CPU unit pricing will need to be normalized so that it could be treated more as a commodity.