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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."
Well thats a relief, I'd hate to know (in these economic times) that some information could not be retrieved because of inability to pay the transfer fees, and not, in my opinion, the more important cost of storage size.
The only way this could be a loss to amazon is if somebody stores a ton of stuff (say, gigs and gigs of videos) and after initially storing it sits on it and transfers continuously without paying for more space. Other than that, I consider this a suddenoutbreakofcommonsense.
Back in my day, we called it hosting. That was what, oh, a year ago? And by the way, get off my lawn.
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.
...I'm not sure how accurate that is. In my experience S3 and EC2 enable small companies to do things they might not otherwise hassle with.
The article also says "The glory days of the UNIX system administrator and the Java programmer are dead and buried". Really? From what I've seen, good Unix sysadmins are in high demand - whether the servers are in your colo rack or in a RackSpace facility, you still need someone to mind the farm and twiddle the Puppet manifests. Not sure about Java programmers, but demand for Ruby (especially Rails) programmers is quite high.
The Army reading list
The problem of making web businesses profitable has been with us for a long time. Micropayments, internet dollars, memberships, the list of attempts is long - with some successes and a heck of a lot of failures. The number of sites saying "free for the first 3 months" is ridiculous. Then they try to charge and all their members go away. Nasty. Bad for business.
S3 is - basically - a tax on bytes. Maybe that's a way to go. But it would end up encouraging sites that move large amounts of data, instead of being useful and efficient. Not so good.
It's for sure we need some sort of reward mechanism to allow innovation to survive. At the moment all we have is advertising. This not enough - Google not withstanding. Heck, I turn them off .. so where is the revenue?
Any ideas?
"Cats like plain crisps"
So let me get this straight. When coal miners lose their jobs because of changes in the energy industry, it's progress, and the onus should be on the workers to be flexible and learn new skills ... but when it happens in IT, we're supposed to cry foul? What I hope this *will* do, however, is raise expectations as far as the consistency and reliability of software goes. In the process we'd probably lose code monkeys, but not those who have invested in (and benefit from) a more rigorous education.
Mark Everett Hall really looks at things from a biased IT perspective. Yes, in his analysis, this will hurt US as IT professionals, but we do not constitute the entire economy. In fact, when businesses get leaner the economy gets better on a macro scale. Yeah, we could be hurting, but that doesn't mean the economy will be.
And that, of course, is assuming you buy the thesis that people will move into this and fire their IT staff all in 2009 - here's a clue: they won't.
And IF they did, what do you think us highly skilled laborers would be working on? My guess is cloud computing - those things don't code, administer or test themselves. Truly, looking on the bright side, one can visualize all IT effort being concerted into one specific area, hastening the arrival of new innovations - but I'm of the opinion that that analysis goes too far the other way.
My bet, the pendulum will continue on its slow course back to dumber clients and smarter servers, but it's not going to change anything in major way overnight, or over 2009.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
That article manages to say so little in so many words, one of which is "leverage". When it does actually say something, it's just baseless "X is dead" statements.
On second thought, I guess that does say a lot, in its own way.
Skype is too convoluted... Now I'm reverse-engineering the Kyoto Protocol.
It is not accurate. I think that laws of conservation of energy apply here.. If the companies won't develop and/or deploy in-house some software and use SaaS, the resources they don't need were used by others to provide the service.
"Intel, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and their supply-chain partners in China need fewer engineers and assembly-line workers to design and build machines to run the packaged or custom apps"
WTF? Does Amazon et al run their services on abacuses?
And if companies want to get all they can from the service, they need IT people coz the sales&mgmt ppl won't do anything.
Nobody wants to look at the data I've stored. Not even myself.
Have gnu, will travel.
> "The bigger question with the cloud is, who really pays?"
That question was raised and answered when the cloud was formed....'everyone'.
This is a great model, since the consumer can pay for the product, pay for delivery of the product, and pay again for the internet connection, any extra "overage" of their byte-cap that they incur.
Explain how this works out in favor of customers?
Oh, thats right, customers exist just as "revenue generating units", to hell with providing them value.
If the author thinks that Saas hurts the economy by making developers obsolete, then he should asks himself whether computers, power tools, etc also hurt the economy by making certain jobs obsolete.
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.
Unless that data is mountains of scalding hot porn, I don't think they're going to make much money.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Wouldn't the decreasing cost of space (i.e Moore's Law) mean that eventually that their business market would be doomed, or would it mean that they're going to get away with making more money as more space becomes more cheaply available? The going price of a 500GB Seagate internal HD seems to be well between USD53.35 to USD176.00.
Granted that I should know better than to use Google as a reliable source of information; that means the cost/GB ranges anywhere between USD00.11 and USD00.36. I'm a bit too lazy to calculate the set mean and the set standard deviation, but it would come out to be just about equal (in cost) to using this new "cloud" or just a bit more expensive (by a couple cents). However, in the long run, it would be much cheaper to just buy a hard drive. I don't know who they're trying to fleece, really.
Boo Hoo, SaaS and Outsourcing are taking our jobs. It is only threatening because it is change in the status quo.
Lets take a look at the 1970's 1980's and 1990's. IT was a great place to work in, New innovative stuff, a pioneer in the future... and the fact that your job as an IT guy probably within a half a decade replaced the work of a dozen people. These were the heyday of our economy, what happened to those dozen people who's job your replaced... Did they all become programmers or system admins... No. Did they all go to the streets begging for money... No. They moved on some retired (Just as IT guys today are, like the ones who started the the 70's and early 80's) Others being forced with change and out of their comfort zone got new jobs doing different things, things that a computer can't do, but perhaps because of the computer it is affordable to hire people to do these things. The computer released many people from the hum drum monotonous jobs, and placed them in jobs where either they had to be more physical, or smarter. Who care about wasting month of crunching number to find sales statistics, Now you can get a computer to do that and it opens up the job as a business analysis who can run huge data sets of stats in 5-50 minutes. Then using his brain and intuition make heads or tails out of the data, determine when causation creates correlation and when it doesn't. Seeing these numbers make decisions to improve these numbers. A computer still isn't smart enough to make these good judgement calls. If a computer was ruling things I would outlaw tatoo's because it increases the chances in getting into a car accident.
So now we are in a new generation IT jobs are now the hum drum jobs we can share information so easily that we no longer need to hire a guy full time to stare at the activity monitor of the server and fix it when something gets out of whack. We can get a SaaS service where there are teams of people looking at 1000's of peoples servers and fixing them when they get out of whack and doing it for cheaper without hardware overhead. It is more efficient, economical, and probably environmental (100 different servers all running at 5% capacity, vs. 25 servers at a SaaS shop running at 25% capacity). But now we IT workers who took the job of millions of people are now going Boo Hoo because there is a new innovation which makes our jobs redundant or useless, just as we did 20-30 years ago.
So what do we do now... We cant all go work at a SaaS shop. There will still be needs for Higher Level IT Workers, or many organizations. But for the rest of us, who now are in hard times we need to innovate and expand beyond what we are comfortable with. How can you use SaaS to your own advantage, now as a small business you can get high quality services without having to hire more IT workers. So now you can go and find your niche doing a job and charging rates lower then the competitors because you have mastered SaaS before them. Or offering services that wasn't feasible before.
Inovation breads more inovation. Change is hard, hard times bring change. You can either just cry about it and fight it and loose and become outdated. Or you can embrace it and expand yourself to a new level.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
Right. Who do you think is developing the programs that run on EC2? And who do you think is needed to manage the instances (VMs), or write software to manage them?
Adapt or die.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Well there is a loss of energy that does apply in many ways.
Think of the job of a system administrator at a medium sized company. If he does his job well things run more or less by itself with planed maintenance, but for the most part one admin can keep 100-200 computers running smoothly but for the medium sized company he only needs to keep 50 operational. Then you have a SaaS company they may have 4 admins keeping track of 800 servers, and that is their full time job.
The same with electrical power 100 servers spread across many companies all running at an average of 5% utilization or 20 servers all running at an average of 25% utilization.
You have economy of scale going on. So not all people loss from a company going SaaS will go to a SaaS shop there will be a net loss in jobs from the IT sector.
That said, being that SaaS offers services at a price that was once unaffordable to small businesses it can lead to new businesses to grow and flurish and create new sectors of growth.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
By the arguments presented in that article, SaaS is a threat to IT workers because it is an improvement. Surely then, optimal employment would occur only when we only code in assembler on the slowest processors we can find. That way, companies will have to spend billions on hardware in order get the performance they need, and the slow pace of development will keep tons of developers employed.
The same with electrical power 100 servers spread across many companies all running at an average of 5% utilization or 20 servers all running at an average of 25% utilization.
This is never true, 5%*5 isn't 25% it might very well be 300%. Server load and in this case; batch job scheduling are very hard to do right.
But sure there are "synergy effects", they are smaller than one might believe.
Just once, I want to ask someone in charge of a large company's "cloud services" or something what happens when it rains, just so I can see the mortified look on his face and watch the colour drain away before he runs out of the room screaming something about umbrellas and airship water tanks.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
I love the ridiculous claims of the CW story and how it's going to hurt the IT economy. The entirety of IT exists because it introduces efficiencies that reduce labor costs. We didn't cry when our fancy computers put filing clerks out of a job? Or when the internet put message couriers out of a job? If anyone should have learned to not fear efficiency it should be IT workers. Someone has to run and engineer the cloud, someone will still need to connect the users to the cloud, etc. If you think you can work in IT, and do the same thing for your entire career, you are a fool. In the same way that broadband allowed the net to offer services we never would have dreamed of in the days of 56k, it's very possible that these services will allow the role of IT to expand in new ways, and be even MORE important to businesses. If your really scared of the big bad cloud, learn the skills needed to become a specialist in helping businesses transition to cloud based services.
Then again, maybe you got comfortable in your current position, and sat on your laurels, and some engineers with bigger ideas and superior skills just reduced your job to a very simple script.
Contrary to the "saas is bad because everyone outsources and doens't hire developers" statement linked...
1) Why should companies hire IT workers to do the same job they can do more economically with SAAS if it meets their needs?
2) If hiring local workers leads to better products and services for your company, then inevitably those businesses who want to rise above will pay for local developers.
3) Who do you think builds and maintains "software as a service?" - developers
Amazon is getting to be a little greedy.
I think www.crashplan.com is better option for me as I can use a buddy system. Basically what it means I can use my buddy's hard drive across the country to story my data free of charge. I just pay for the license of the software and I am free to do whatever I want.
cut out the middleman, no need for jungledisk. I just hacked my own on-line backup solution.
There's some nice toolkits available. I used jets3t (see https://jets3t.dev.java.net/).
1. Create a list of files to backup,
2. compare list of checksums of these files with the ones on-line (stored in the S3 meta-data)
3. upload changed files
4. done
I'm currently at 0.22$ per month for about 4 GB of data.
So, we will start seeing 402 errors now?
Amazon S3 Adds Option To Make Data Accessors Pay
I'll make those data accessor bastards pay. Boy will they pay!
I, for one, would like to thank CWmike for giving me a link to a site that immediately begins playing loud music. I LOVE that and, more importantly, my co workers love it to.
Thank you.
Well, dont know, but the stats e.g. http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html don't exactly convince me that Java is dead..
S3... I've heard that before... and it didn't bode well....
Oh yeah! The Solid Snake System! That was a great.... oh shit.
"If Common Sense was so common, it wouldn't be such a valued trait."
Any public S3 object can also be accessed as a BitTorrent, which is another way to mitigate high bandwidth charges on large, popular files.
Obviously, it's going to be difficult to allow folks to access the .torrent but not access the original file, but using long random names for things would probably work.
Amazon is not greedy, it's capitalism, man. Companies, that do business in cloud just have leverage to offset costs partially to the client. Our company is planning to discuss this at coming Cloud Computing Conference 2009, keep tuned - http://www.cloudslam09.com/