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Home > Cloud computing News > Users endorse Amazon EC2 pricing update |
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With the Reserved Instances option unveiled this week, users can purchase an Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance (i.e., a unit of server and storage space on Amazon infrastructure) up-front for a onetime fee, launch it anytime over a one- to three-year period at a lower cost than buying the instance on demand. Customers still pay only for what they use, even if they do not use all the reserved capacity. Pricing details are available on the Amazon Web Services page.
"Your launch is guaranteed to succeed; there's no chance of encountering any transient limitations in EC2 capacity [with Reserved Instances]," wrote Jeff Barr, lead Web services evangelist at Amazon, on his blog.
Bill Ovoian, an IT director at the Phoenix/Communications Group, a media company in Boston, says cloud computing "helps patch some weak points in most business infrastructure." His company plans to use Amazon's caching service to offload static files and images and then move into other areas and be able to scale up as needed.
The ability to rent an instance ahead of time is important, Ovoian said. "This service will allow those who lay awake at night always worrying about capacity to set up a low cost pool of resources to help mitigate any issues; which is good." Ovoian believes companies will still look to use their own flavor of virtualization software to control and maintain production, test and disaster recovery sites.
Cloud security and other concerns
The company's global head of security, Adrian Seccombe, said it repatriated the data results over a secure line that ran end to end into the Amazon cloud. But Seccombe's concern was proving that there was no trace of the company's data left in the Amazon cloud. Eli Lilly had to take Amazon's word for it. (You can read the case study on Eli Lilly here.) Many companies say this is not enough and that a third party should audit Amazon's service to ensure that the data has been completely erased. Despite these concerns, Amazon's new pricing scheme will touch a nerve with budget-conscious IT buyers hit hard by the recession. Cloud computing is purportedly a way to save data center costs by not purchasing and running equipment in-house or with a traditional hosting company that charges a fixed rate whether servers run or not. But little real cost comparison data is available, and customer case studies are few. Amazon's effort to provide more pricing options and transparency of EC2 is a good move. In a recent survey of SearchServerVirtualization.com's IT audience, 24% of respondents or 118 companies said the biggest barrier to adoption of cloud computing services was a lack of clarity about the cost benefits. A close second, 22% of respondents, said unknown management and support headaches were a gating factor. While 86 respondents, or 17% of those who took the survey, said that the lack of security was a major barrier to adoption. Still, IT organizations are open to learning about cloud computing and how it might save them money. Approximately 30% of our survey respondents, 155 companies, said they were more likely to check out cloud services if their IT budget was reduced. About 40% said they weren't sure and 25% said cloud services were not on their radar.
Let us know what you think about the story; email Jo Maitland, Executive Editor.
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