"Microsoft has announced pricing for Azure [at the WPC] that marginally undercuts Amazon on raw computing for Windows-based clouds but remains more expensive than the mega book warehouse's Linux option. The company has said it will charge $0.12 per compute hour for its Windows Azure Compute. Amazon's price for an ondemand Windows instance starts at $0.125. Amazon's Linux-based service undercuts Windows, with pricing starting at $0.10 per computing hour. Add in storage, and Azure's price will creep up further against Amazon: Azure will charge $0.15 per gigabyte stored versus $0.10 per gigabyte each month from Amazon."
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2007-09-22
Member since:2006-01-12
Member since:2005-07-06
http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/blog/archives/2009/0...
That's why you have to be rather cagey about running anything critical on any kind of undefinable 'cloud' infrastructure. I've heard of lots of people who've become disatisfied with EC2. I don't know of anyone that uses Azure.
If you are OK with downtime you can't control and you don't have any flexible needs (certain software installations etc.) then that's great. If you're not then you should just run some dedicated, accountable systems you can control to ensure at least the critical parts of your system are up. For example, if you use Google Apps then bring peoples' mail down to an IMAP or webmail system you can control so users can actually read their mail and use Google for things like mail relaying.
Member since:2005-07-06
That's why you have to be rather cagey about running anything critical on any kind of undefinable 'cloud' infrastructure. I've heard of lots of people who've become disatisfied with EC2. I don't know of anyone that uses Azure.
If you are OK with downtime you can't control and you don't have any flexible needs (certain software installations etc.) then that's great. If you're not then you should just run some dedicated, accountable systems you can control to ensure at least the critical parts of your system are up. For example, if you use Google Apps then bring peoples' mail down to an IMAP or webmail system you can control so users can actually read their mail and use Google for things like mail relaying.
People become unhappy because they expect a silver bullet that cures all of lifes problems only to find that it isn't the silverbullet but only valuable for certain case scenarios. I don't think that there is anything wrong with the idea but it seems that some businesses go over board thinking that they can throw everything on 'Product X' and all their problems will be solved.
Member since:2006-02-05
AFAIK, amazon and google don't really offer SLAs, which is the only thing that is really newsworthy in this story (the whole 99.95% uptime thing) Overall, I would say overall google has been better then amazon at uptime, with a few notable exceptions.
Honestly, what I love about cloud services is the whole "free" level thing. Means if I have an idea for something small but cool, I can spend a weekend throwing it together in rails or django, and then toss it up to heroku or appengine. If it goes nowhere, all it cost me was a weekend of the fun kind of development. Heroku is fairly limiting, but GAE's free level is pretty generous, they say they structured it to support 5 million hits a month.
Member since:2007-09-22
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2007-04-23
Member since:2006-02-05
