| By Udayan Banerjee |
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| November 26, 2009 11:30 AM EST |
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6,258 |
Amazon Cloud on Ulitzer
Their economy of scale will be difficult to match.
What about Microsoft - they are constrained by the fact that they have to defend their desktop business - which will prevent them from following optimal cloud strategy!
Cloud Computing Service
Service provider with large number of networked computer systems
Allowing you to use a slice of that processing power and storage
Shielding your program and data from others sharing the same service, and
Charging you for your actual usage
Value Proposition of Cloud Computing
Elastic Capacity - Pay for what you actually use
Economy of Scale - Of hardware, Infrastructure and Management
Comparison between Amazon EC2 and Google GAE
Though different cloud service providers are following different strategies, these are the two uniquely different approaches. Others either are similar to one of these or fall somewhere in between.
I have excluded SaaS from this discussion - you can see the comparison between IaaS, PaaS and SaaS on this post on Cloud Strategy.
Amazon EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud)
Google GAE (Google App Engine)
Base Technology
Virtualization
Existing Google infrastructure
Unit of Scalability
Dynamically instantiated virtual machines
Every transactions initiated by user
Every scheduled or queued task
Persistence
Reserved Virtual Machine using standard RDBMS
By directly persisting objects on to Google BigTable
No need for any object-relational mapping
Software License
All software license required
OS, RDBMS, Web Server, App Server ...
Behaves like a Service Bus of infinite capacity
Application code can be directly deployed
Readiness
Reasonably mature
Can be viewed as an extension to existing hosting services
Very much in Beta
Will take couple of years to mature
Best for ...
Application requiring heavy processing power for short duration
Startups wanting to start free and have the ability to scale when the venture succeed
Economics
Saving potential of 30-70% for the right type of application
Not clear
However, it can be an order of magnitude improvement
Innovativeness
Incremental
Potentially Disruptive
Why is GAE potentially disruptive?
Over the last decade, Google has build a huge cloud infrastructure for its search and other services
The infrastructure has been build using very cost effective hardware
Fault tolerance is designed into the architecture
They have perfected technologies and algorithms like MapReduce and BigTable created for such infrastructure
It is highly scalable
Google is following a strategy of opening up their infrastructure for developers to use - for example Closure JavaScript Toolset
They will optimize cloud access through Chrome OS and Android Mobile OS
Their economy of scale will be difficult to match.
What about Microsoft - they are constrained by the fact that they have to defend their desktop business - which will prevent them from following optimal cloud strategy!
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