AWS cuts cloud storage price to UNDER a cent per gig a month

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has lowered prices again, this time dropping the fee for its archival Glacier storage below a cent per gigabyte per month to $0.007 per gig per month. The price cut is only applicable in some of AWS' regions, for now, but at that price, and with Glacier's deliberately slow restore times, who cares …

[Steven Roper]

It doesn't make any difference

I don't care if they drop the price to under a cent per petabyte per decade, it doesn't change the fundamental issue. Which is that they can hold your data to ransom because it's stored on a machine not under your control.

Who's to say that once you've become dependent on it and stored all your work on it, that they won't jack up the price knowing that you're now hooked? Every two-bit street drug dealer knows this gambit, and anyone who thinks that major corporations are any more ethical is deluding themselves.

Then there's the issue of solvency: what if the cloud hosting provider goes bust? Too bad, you just lost all your data eh? Sorry about that, but shareholders and creditors come first.

Then there's security and confidentiality. Suppose someone high-up in the cloud provider decides that your new design for a solar power generator should go to profit their corporation instead of you, you little upstart? Or if someone decides to go on a little fishing expedition, or a hostile ex befriends someone who works at the cloud company, or...

Yes, cloud has its uses. If you have data that you want to share with multiple people, such as a file locker, then it's just the ticket. But as a secure archival and backup system? No bloody way. Nothing beats storage on your own machines at your own sites under your own control. Not even cloud that only costs pocket change.

[LucreLout]

Re: It doesn't make any difference

@Steve Roper

Who's to say that once you've become dependent on it and stored all your work on it, that they won't jack up the price knowing that you're now hooked? Every two-bit street drug dealer knows this gambit, and anyone who thinks that major corporations are any more ethical is deluding themselves.

An excellent and very apt description, with which I fully agree. However.....

Then there's the issue of solvency: what if the cloud hosting provider goes bust?

This can be handled with escrow contracts and corporate structuring. I'm not saying it IS, only that it can be.

Then there's security and confidentiality. Suppose someone high-up in the cloud provider decides that your new design for a solar power generator should go to profit their corporation instead of you, you little upstart?

Encryption is the answer here, surely? I have loads of confidential information stored in my dropbox, all encrypted. The worst consequences of unauthorised disclosure would be financial, which while certainly adverse, should be kept in perspective.

But as a secure archival and backup system? No bloody way. Nothing beats storage on your own machines at your own sites under your own control.

I agree, though would caveat that having a backup beyond the reach of your admins COULD be used to mitigate key person / malicious ex-employee risks. Having an online backup in a different country can also be useful.

The cloud is literally Other Peoples Computers. You can almost see the lights dim when I explain that to my business users. It is most certainly useful, and as it happens cost effective, but it is not a panacea, and it is not without risk. So we better keep our talented & experienced systems engineer, even if we're weighing in some of the old tin.

As a dev, I can fire up actual dev servers for non-confidential data tasks faster on AWS/Azure than I could raise the first item of internal paperwork to get a virt setup. And that very much is a management issue.

[Steve Davies 3]

Reasons for the price war?

To drive the competition (eg MS, IBM, Rackspace etc) out of the biz

Once they are the only game in town the prices will go up.

[FelixReg]

Eliminate the competition and then raise the prices

That's the strategy I heard as a kid about what the new supermarket chains did in the '30's.

Which thinking sort of explains the '30's in a cute way. That is, what with thinking that's what happened, it's no wonder those people kept a depression going for so long.

Count the number of times someone eliminated the competition and raised prices. And then count the number of times prices kept going down.

Or just use common sense. Are data storage prices going up? Ever? And is Amazon going to drive data storage competition out of the market? Ever? With prices that pay for an equivalent new disk drive every 3 months?