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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."
...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"
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
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.
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.