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CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing — Comments Off on Computing.co.uk – Amazon Web Services and its mammoth-sized inferiority complex
09
Dec 15

Computing.co.uk – Amazon Web Services and its mammoth-sized inferiority complex

Are scale and price the only concerns of your business?

We’re great! Not just great, really really great! Honestly, let me tell you again how truly great we are!’

If, like me, you were at the Amazon Web Services Enterprise Summit recently, these words might clang a horribly dissonent bell for you.

It’s inevitable that these sorts of events will feature some back-slapping and self-aggrandisment, but this took the biscuit, cake, and most of the rest of the bakery too.

You expect some shiny toothed VP to stand up and go on at great length about why they feel that their products and services are at the top of the tree, and then exhort everyone present to hand over oodles of cash at the earliest opportunity. You expect it because it’s just what tends to happen at these things, but is it at all productive?

I don’t believe these keynote speeches are useful for anyone. Why? Because ‘company says that its products are great’ doesn’t make for particularly interesting listening, and it’s certainly not something many journalists will want to cover.

More of the computing.co.uk post by Stuart Sumner

Get Better / IT Strategy — Comments Off on Computerworld – Amazon vs. Google vs. Windows Azure: Cloud computing speed showdown
24
Mar 14

Computerworld – Amazon vs. Google vs. Windows Azure: Cloud computing speed showdown

The cloud computing sales pitch is seductive because the cloud offers many advantages. There are no utility bills to pay, no server room staff who want the night off, and no crazy tax issues for amortising the cost of the machines over N years. You give them your credit card, and you get root on a machine, often within minutes.

To test out the options available to anyone looking for a server, I rented some machines on Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, and Microsoft Windows Azure and took them out for a spin. The good news is that many of the promises have been fulfilled. If you click the right buttons and fill out the right Web forms, you can have root on a machine in a few minutes, sometimes even faster. All of them make it dead simple to get the basic goods: a Linux distro running what you need.

At first glance, the options seem close to identical. You can choose from many of the same distributions, and from a wide range of machine configuration options. But if you start poking around, you’ll find differences — including differences in performance and cost. The machines may seem like commodities, but they’re not. This became more and more evident once the machines started churning through my benchmarks.

More of the Computerworld article