Amazon Web Services has announced big price cuts across its cloud computing portfolio at an event in San Francisco – one day after rival Google did the same.
Andy Jassy, AWS senior vice president, explained to delegates in his keynote speech that lowering prices was “not new” for AWS, laying out the company’s latest price drop.
The facts: Amazon’s S3 storage cloud gets a pricing tier decrease from 36% to 65%. M3 gets an average 38% decrease, while C3 gets 30% – these were Linux prices, although Jassy promised there would be “comparable” figures for Windows and other operating systems.
Amazon’s relational database services will get an average reduction of 28%, while Elasticache drops by 34% and Elastic MapReduce goes down by anywhere between 27% and 61%.
“Lowering prices is not new for us – it’s something we do on a regular basis,” said Jassy. “This is something we …
Cloud computing powered by open source is of growing interest all over the world.
Enterprise customers are frustrated with growing costs and limitations of traditional IT software. This problem is exacerbated when start-ups appear out of nowhere to compete with agile businesses powered by the cloud. To meet customers’ needs, I have seen a number of legacy IT vendors extend the OpenStack cloud platform to give their customers a viable cloud computing operating system that does not lock customers in with a single provider and limited options.
John Felker is the Director, Cyber and Intelligence Strategy, at HP Enterprise Services, U.S. Public Sector. He works to develop cyber intelligence strategies to better integrate a broad range of cyber intelligence inputs to improve defensive cyber and business operation efforts, in direct support of the public sector and critical infrastructure industries.
SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Thank you for joining us today, John. Before we drill down into your perspectives on cybersecurity trends and the current threat landscape, please tell us about your background and your role at HP.
You are moving workloads to the public or private cloud to save money, but you realize that the change from traditional IT to cloud means fundamental changes in the way you think about and operate the business. IT needs to be even more “service oriented,” because cloud is about providing infrastructure, platforms, or Software as a Service. This focus on services drives fundamental changes to processes, policies, governance, security, chargeback / showback, provisioning / orchestration, monitoring, configuration, licenses, procurement, resource/capacity management, etc.
In the cloud storage industry, we talk a lot about “price wars.” Every 6 months or so, one of the major cloud storage providers drop their prices, and everyone else follows suit. Well guess what?
Game over.
Perhaps you’ve heard Google dropped the cost to $0.026/GB per month for standard storage (GCS) and $0.020/GB per month for DRA (Durable Reduced Availability). Of course, there will still be more price drops here and there, but fundamentally we’ve reached the point where cloud storage has effectively been commoditized.
You need a PhD to work out the best option, says Google SVP
Google has cut prices for its cloudy infrastructure across the board, aiming to “blend IaaS and PaaS” as well as change the outlook of the cloud pricing wars.
The Mountain View giant is reducing the price of its IaaS offering Compute Engine by a third (32%) ‘across all sizes, regions and classes’, ‘significant reductions in database operations and front-end compute instances’ for the PaaS product App Engine, a two thirds (68%) drop in Cloud Storage pricing as well as an 85% reduction in Google BigQuery on-demand.
Google also announced Sustained-Use Discounts to provide better savings for regular users. Those who use a virtual machine for over a quarter of a month get an automatic discount, while an additional 30% cut is added for those who use a VM for the entire month.
APIs – application programming interfaces — are an old technology that has become today’s hottest method for getting critical data to mobile apps. APIs are good for business. APIs drove $2 billion in business for Expedia by securely exposing valuable content to its affiliate network.
But there are hidden dangers to using APIs. APIs share many of the same threats that plague the web, but APIs have unique risk profile that must be managed. It is a mistake to think we can secure APIs the same way we secure the web.
But there are some really simple things that anyone implementing an API can do, right now, that will minimize the risk of APIs. Here’s one I’ve pulled from a new eBooklet by Scott Morrison of CA Technologies called Five Simple Strategies for Securing Your APIs. The tip? Turn on SSL for your API and keep it on.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Chris C. Kemp, former NASA CTO and co-founder of OpenStack, will explore the origins of OpenStack, diving into how this technology advanced NASA’s mission and helped the White House ignite a cloud computing revolution across the federal government. He’ll take a close look at how the fastest growing open source project in history evolved – and where it’s going – before turning our attention to the forces that have catalyzed this revolution and are reshaping enterprise computing. Finally he will look at some examples of cloud technologies and architectures that are enabling the most successful (and often newest) companies to challenge their largest and most entrenched competitors.
Enterprise organizations are looking for service providers to be a trusted partner with them throughout the entire transition through steady state process. The key for cloud providers is to develop ongoing relationships with their customers using hands-on engagement processes from beginning to end. A high touch process ensures that customers engage with various members of the transition team throughout the three stages of the on-boarding process: Business and Technology Assessment, Transition Plan, and Business Reviews.
Like most new technologies, cloud computing can require significant changes in business processes, application architectures, technology infrastructure, and operating models that must be properly understood before embarking on any new initiative. Having a well-thought-out strategy can mean the difference between success and failure. The first step to understanding these challenges is the assessment.
I see and read a lot of IT articles almost demanding that organizations must do certain things to ensure that some piece of their infrastructure is secure, highly available, fault tolerant, agile, flexible, scalable, recoverable, cloud’able, whatever the silo needs or face the dire circumstances. I’m guilty of it too over the years. Organizations must have a WAF for PCI compliance or Remote employees need to have an encrypted tunnels to the corporate network or any other command pertaining to the health of your infrastructure.