Amazon slices prices on dedicated EC2 private cloud puffs

Maybe there's something in the water – or in the coffee – in Seattle that makes big companies create and maintain monopolies through aggressive pricing. First Microsoft with its Windows desktop and then server monopoly, and now Amazon Web Services with its unending price cuts on its infrastructure cloud. The latest chopfest …

[Nate Amsden]

been sayin for 2 years

you could make EC2 completely free and I still wouldn't want to use it. Pricing is only a small part of the problem with it. Though it's the easiest one to justify with to executives.

As a technical person I have no problem paying a premium for a quality service or product. EC2 (others are similar though EC2 is obviously most popular) is the worst of both worlds - poor product and poor pricing (the core issue is fixed instance provisioning and inability to share/oversubscribe resources - it's not a problem with the price itself it's a problem with the architecture).

I've gotten quite a few ping backs by folks that like my comments here it's been interesting.

[Tachikoma]

Obligatory PRISM reference.

[randhawp]

EC2 / Amazon have done a great favor to the small enterprises, start ups and micro companies. EC2 may have limitations but it makes economic sense. For old school guys with rigid single server implementations it may be a pain, but if you are looking at distributed computing and dialing up instances from code , it is a charm. EC2 and similar virtual cloud instances do require a new thinking. If you are thinking of porting an existing server and all it software to a virtual instance - rethink. If you can divide your software to run on 2 or more instances and make bottlenecks of your software run on an elastic EC2 instances the you will see the advantages.