What do you buy from Amazon? Books, CDs, DVDs, games, perhaps. But how about a bit of spare processing power, or some storage, or maybe even a few virtual server environments?
Amazon, one of the web’s biggest and best-known retailers, could be about to become part of your IT department, and not just because it sells the latest Microsoft certification manuals.
Last month, the company quietly launched in the US a beta-test version of a pay-as-you-go utility computing service, with the rather obscure name of Elastic Compute Cloud. Amazon describes this as a ‘true virtual computing environment’ that allows users to run up to 20 virtual servers within the firm’s own data centre, each the equivalent of a system with a 1.7GHz Xeon processor, 1.75GB of memory, 160GB of local disk and 250Mbit/s of network bandwidth.
The whole shebang is managed and controlled using a set of standard web services commands, charged only on the basis of what is used, and can be set up and switched off as you like. For example, each virtual server costs just 10 cents an hour; internet traffic is charged at 20 cents per gigabyte, plus 15 cents per month for each gigabyte of Amazon’s on-demand storage. Customers can use the system as they like to run applications, host web servers, store databases or just use spare disk space. How does that compare with your operational running costs?
The service sounds as close to the goal of genuine utility computing as you can find, only from an online department store. Plenty of major suppliers, notably IBM, HP and Sun Microsystems, have talked for some time about the goal of IT as a utility, provided in the same way as electricity or telephony. In most cases, the pay-as-you-go aspects were often a commercial or contractual fudge, spreading the cost out over a period of time for fixed resources with an element of spare capacity when needed. Sun launched a ‘$1 per processor per hour’ grid computing service in 2004 but achieved limited take up. Specialist software-as-a-service providers such as Salesforce.com also offer business applications on a per-user model.
The potential for major IT users offering a utility service has intriguing possibilities. There have been rumours that Google will soon offer something similar as it builds out its giant data centre in Oregon. No doubt eBay is also paying close attention. Who next? Value Computer Power coming soon from Tesco, bonus loyalty points available? Amazon’s move suggests that widespread pay-as-you-go utility computing may not be so far away.
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