By the Numbers: How Google Compute Engine Stacks Up To Amazon EC2 76
vu1986 writes "Google launched its EC2 rival, Google Compute Engine, last June, it set some high expectations. Sebastian Standil's team at Scalr put the cloud infrastructure service through its paces — and were pleasantly surprised at what they found. A note about our data: The benchmarks run to collect the data presented here were taken twice a day, over four days, then averaged. When a high variance was observed, we took note of it and present it here as intervals for which 80 percent of observed data points fall into."
Re:A non techy benefit of Amazon (Score:2, Interesting)
The question to Google is: what is the long term perspective here? Will this shut down if it doesn't generate some level of revenue/profit? What is that level?
Is it possible to have a dynamically generated graph somewhere on Google that would show how far away is the break even point for this service, when will it become profitable (and this graph should be updated once in a while, every week or month to get a feel as to its long term prospect)? If it's a profit center on its own, at least there is a good chance it will stay in business.
Re:Good for competition (Score:1, Interesting)
Yes, 2 is better then 1. But 3 is better then 2 and 20 is better then 3.
- only if they exist in the market that is free of regulations, that help one business to get a leg up against another. If it's the free market that provides competition, then yes. If it's done the way it was done in (for example) case of Standard Oil, then no. Standard Oil had plenty of competition and it was pushing prices down for 40 years before it was broken up. In these 40 years the company made very good profits, helping to make Rockefeller one of the richest people in the entire history of the world (10 times as wealthy as the wealthiest dollar top billionaires of today). But in the process that company created so many efficiencies to push the prices down, that once it was broken down, the artificial "competition" promoted by the government could never match their scale again, the prices for oil products never went down again, they only went up since then.
You are mistaking competition for the sake of competition with the best choice that market can provide to the customers. In fact it doesn't matter if you are getting your product from a market with 10 players in it or with only 3 or 2 or 1 if you are getting the best deal.
However you know that you are not getting the best deal when the "competition" is artificially created by government, what you end up with is inefficiency and higher prices and lower quality. At that point the choices are non-existing, you have no price competition, that's something that really hurts the clients and the market in general by sucking money out of it into something that shouldn't be there.
Re:A non techy benefit of Amazon (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure it's fun to knock Google for shutting down services, but I believe most (if not all) of their shutdowns have always been free services they provide to consumers. I'm not aware of any paid Google service that has been shutdown. Though, Google has been known to drastically increase the cost of their services where it drives people away (mapping [cnet.com] and AppEngine are 2 more recent examples, though they lowered the price of maps after a lot of people left).
Google is trying to find services to hook people with, so they fund a lot of startup type projects to see what will hook people. When those projects don't produce the results they want, they just shut them down. But from what I've seen, those have mainly been free services.
Now, taking away open standard support, like CalDAV from calendar, is a much more troublesome issue.
Re:What about privacy? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you think Google (or any company) wouldn't try to monetize every bit of data that they get their hands on, you're ridiculously naive.
Re:A non techy benefit of Amazon (Score:2, Interesting)
No, but Amazon is trying hard to apply its resources, they have all the equipment, personnel to run this as part of their store and they are probably eating their own dog food here. So for Amazon AWS is probably central to their actual business model, because they are using the platform to run their business.
For Google this computational platform is really a side business, they can run it and stop it and run it and stop it and it has nothing to do with their main business.
Support? (Score:5, Interesting)