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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."
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"
I think you mean, "you insensitive clouds."
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.