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."

Comments

Whew

[Anthony_Cargile]

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.

Re:Whew

[Telvin_3d]

Depending on the popularity of a piece of data, I could easily see the cost of transfer being much higher over time than the cost of storage. After all, once you have stored your 1GB file on their servers, with a fixed asset cost for that 1GB likely 1$, and then it gets accessed by a couple people a day for a year or so. I'd be willing to bet that the cost of moving the data around would be signifigantly larger than the cost of keeping it stored.

Re:Whew

[nahdude812]

Convenience of access from anywhere (only needing to install the client if I really needed access to a file from a remote location), plus the convenience of effort-free off-site backup.

$16/mo to safely and effortlessly back up 8 years of photography seems like an incredibly good deal to me. I pay way the heck more than this for my homeowner's insurance, and this is just another form of personal property insurance. The only monthly bill that regularly falls under this dollar amount, in fact, is my credit cards, mostly because they're an emergency tool only for me. Everything else costs more. Land line, cell phone, TV service, electric, gas, security system, etc - all much more than this, and I'd be way less devastated if any of these services were lost.

GP said he was shopping for storage, and I recommended a reliable, fast, easy, convenient, and inexpensive option =). A common lament from people who have lost their house and all their possessions in a fire is that they cannot get back their photographs. Everything else they can eventually (assuming no deaths), but the photos are gone forever. And the point is you pay per usage. $0.15 (rates have gone down since I signed up for this apparently) per gb per month is a good rate IMO.

I have a local NAS box w/ redundant disks too. That NAS also backs itself up to external USB disks. I work locally, and back up to the NAS automatically at night. It backs itself up automatically the following night (it runs a few hours before my desktop->NAS backup) giving me 2 days local recovery time, plus 7 more days (how I have it configured in JungleDisk) online should I accidentally delete or corrupt something. Plus in the event of a catastrophic failure (house fire, massive power surge, etc), I have the online backup I can fall back on.

FWIW, I've not found inexpensive external drives to be even remotely reliable as a backup. $100 1TB drives (or similarly discounted drives) have a ridiculously high failure rate. Good if you're transferring some files to a buddy, but a really bad idea as a backup solution. Those things tend to fail as a brick. The whole device just quits some day leaving your data trapped, maybe there, maybe not. Maybe reported writing successfully when it didn't. Maybe it wrote successfully, just can't be read again. That's the sort of drive my NAS backs itself up to, and by this point I've replaced enough of those that I really should have bought better ones out the gate, it would have been cheaper.

Regarding the "SaaS kills developers" article...

[tcopeland]

...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.

Payment Schemes

[SimonInOz]

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?

we're supposed to cry foul?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:we're supposed to cry foul?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Rather, when IT people are writing about coal miners losing their jobs, it's progress; while when IT people are writing about IT people losing their jobs, it's pernicious.

Re:we're supposed to cry foul?

[jellomizer]

Here is a post from the futute...
Local IT is old technology and something new has come along to potentially replace it in its industry. There's no new technology to replace today's SaaS, therefor these workers who are being laid off are at the forefront and they laying off cannot be called progress.

Not buying it - not worried

[religious freak]

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.

Re:Regarding the "SaaS kills developers" article..

[edsousa]

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.

Re:Regarding the "SaaS kills developers" article..

[SanityInAnarchy]

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.