Amazon cut prices (again); OpenStack Grizzly debuts
April 7, 2013
Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.
Amazon and Google trade price cuts. Again
The incumbent public cloud champ and its wanna-be rival took turns cutting prices again last week. Amazon Web Services sliced the price on Windows on-demand EC2 instances by 26 percent – although as the price still depends on region. That move came within hours of Google cutting prices of most of its GCE instances by an average of 4 percent — that little tidbit was buried in larger news that Google is opening up access to Google Compute Engine to any customer willing to pay $400 a month for Google Gold Support.
But because the AWS price cuts were for Windows, that move may have been directed at Microsoft Windows Azure more than Google, but why quibble? NetworkWorld has more as does the Motley Fool. ProfitBricks, another cloud contender, extended its scale up vs. scale out cloud pitch last week as well, making its biggest instance bigger. The new super-duper instance weighs in at 62 cores and 240GB of RAM up from 48 cores and 196GB of RAM…
“By offering variable instance sizes, which now tip the scales at 62 cores and 240GB of RAM, ProfitBricks continues to define Cloud Computing 2.0. ProfitBricks customers can now run massive computational processes at a lower cost while taking advantage of better speed and performance. It also enables users of databases and big data software to scale their virtual servers vertically rather than horizontally.
When is Amazon cloud not the cheapest option? Hint it’s more often than you think
Over the past week several conversations with tech vendors have come around ot the fac tthat, when it comes to actual production workloads, the most cost-effective deployment model — repeated price cuts notwithstanding — is not AWS at all. For example, the venerable analytics company SAS Institute, when it was testing out its new visual analytics tool, did so on AWS because it couldn’t deploy its own hardware fast enough. But that lasted about a month. “Amazon was way too expensive, so we brought it in-house,” SAS CEO and founder Jim Goodnight told me in a recent interview. “Amazon doesnt’ give it away for free,” he said…
Read more from the source @ http://gigaom.com/2013/04/07/the-week-in-cloud-price-cut-after-price-cut-but-amazon-still-too-expensive-for-many/