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Amazon and Hardware As a Service

Posted by kdawson on from the metering-it dept.

sioux_chance writes to recommend an article up on ReadWriteWeb comparing Amazon's S3 and EC2 services with Google AdSense. (They are not the first to coin the term "HaaS" for hardware as a service.) The analogy is that Google increased the granularity of (the article invents the term "fragmentized") the revenue side of the Web business, whereas Amazon's HaaS does the same for the cost side. A comment to the blog posting points out that NearlyFreeSpeech.net has been selling fine-grained hardware capacity for years, but Amazon does bring a greater scale to the business.

4 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. they now own everything by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    the hardware isn't yours, the software isn't yours and if the censoring is any indication your data isn't yours either.

  2. Human Beings as a Service by Draco_es · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Amazon S3 & EC2 are revolutionary, but at some point, it's a reasonable next step. The only big drawback of EC2 is the lack of persistence so it's hard to host a dataserver on there.

    But the truly revolutionary service is Mturk. It's about packetizing tasks for humans! not for computers.

  3. Re:For real applications? by Admiral+Lazzurs · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Now first of all big disclaimer, I am the Chief Systems Architect for Flexiscale.

    While EC2 might not offer you persistent storage or static IP addresses the product the company I work for sells does and it still has the same per hour billing model of Amazon EC2. Have a look at http://www.flexiscale.com/ for more information.

  4. Why we went inhouse by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    We looked at using Amazons storage thing for our start up. There are no technical reasons we didn't use it, we decided against purely because Amazon have been such assholes with patents. Why add to their profits if there's a chance you'll be sued for some obvious technique 5-10 years from now?