Amazon S3 Adds Option To Make Data Accessors Pay

CWmike writes "Amazon.com has rolled out a new option for its Simple Storage Service (S3) that lets data owners shift the cost of accessing their information to users. Until now, individuals or businesses with information stored on S3 had to pay data-transfer costs to Amazon when others made use of the information. Amazon said the new Requester Pays option relieves data providers of that burden, leaving them to pay only the basic storage fees for the cloud computing service. The bigger question with the cloud is, who really pays? Mark Everett Hall argues that IT workers do."

Hmmm, do we see a trend coming on?

[mamono]

With advertising revenues dropping we could see this as a new trend for accessing content. Of course, many sites are popular because they are free so this would likely reduce traffic. I could see how this would be useful for a site like Fark, though, who already has a paying crowd.

Of course, the big users I can see are porn sites.

Duh - it's called increasing productivity

[putaro]

As we consume more IT resources the number of workers per resource unit has to fall - or we're going to wind up spending our entire budget on IT. The question for IT workers is whether the amount of IT workers has peaked or not. I don't think it has yet.

The first computer I worked with was a PDP 11/70. Less than 1 MIP and we had a dedicated operator. By that measure my laptop needs several thousand support personnel.

However, we spent close to $500,000 (in 1981 dollars) for that system. It supported 32 terminals. Today, I could put together 32 desktops plus a server system for less than $100,000 but would probably still want to have a dedicated IT support person for that many desktops (given that it's a small company and that's all of our IT infrastructure - larger companies get by with fewer desktop support people due to economies of scale).

My wife worked at Oracle here in Japan for a while. The director of the Oracle certificate program once set a long term goal of, I think, 5 million certified Oracle DBA's in Japan. Now, Japan has a total population of about 128 million so he was setting a goal of 4 out of every 100 people to be Oracle DBA's. Absolutely ludicrous.

Personnel are now the largest cost in IT. Anything that reduces IT costs will be reducing personnel costs. The real question is whether the IT budget overall is shrinking or growing.

The interesting long term question is whether IT will mature like power or plumbing to the point where an average company does not keep IT specialists on staff but just calls them in as needed. I would argue that it is different since IT done properly is a strategic asset customized to your company somehow but time will tell.

Re:we're supposed to cry foul?

[maz2331]

No, the IT guys who lose their jobs will most likely be those supporting commodity solutions that the average secretary is too lazy to figure out for herself. There is still going to be a huge need for local support and IT staff no matter what happens, because some things are just too damn important to trust outside of the organization, or too expensive to not do yourself.

Few, if any, companies are going to use an outside provider to hold their critical and/or proprietary data. There is no way in Hell, for example, that my Subversion repository will be stored anywhere but on a machine in my company, under my direct control, physically and logically - regardless of SLAs, encryption, or whatever else.

And I am most certainly not putting our accounting database anywhere that could possibly require a "rent payment" or external connection - if I lost access for 1 minute, we're out of business entirely. Or, what if it leaked out and competitors had access?

There is no possible way to make a cloud of untrusted machines substitute for locally owned, managed, and controlled systems.

For the love of God, managers don't even trust the geek in the cubes, what makes anyone think that they will trust a "cloud" with anything important?

Some managers have proprietary information that gives them an edge over the competition. Toss that out there? Some may even be Bernie Madoff, and those fucks aren't giving up any information.

A whole lot of IT will stay local just for security and paranoia reasons alone.

In short, clouds may expand what we do nowadays but they won't supplant anything.

Oh, and who is going to troubleshoot the loss of the Internet connection?