Cloud Computing’s Confusion: Pricing

Grazed from eWeek. Author: James McGuire.

To understand why the pricing of cloud computing is so confusing and semi-chaotic, take a look at the cloud’s confusing and semi-chaotic history. The exact start is hazy, but 2006 was a major milestone. That’s when Amazon Web Services started offering utility computing services to external customers. The story is often told that Amazon, with its vast data centers, had excess compute capacity to sell.

Yet Amazon CTO Werner Vogels calls this a myth: “Within two months after launch, AWS would have already burned through the excess Amazon.com capacity," he told Quora. "Amazon Web Services was always considered a business by itself.”…

That’s impressive: demand so great that AWS would have burned through excess in only two months? Clearly a market existed. Soon the sector was crowded with competitors, from hosting companies to telcos to big IT service firms. They all hustled to sell compute capability remotely – “over the cloud” – coining the term Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)…

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