Comments on: Will Moore’s law find it’s way to the cloud?

By: Computing Cloud Price War Breaks Out! - Talking Out Cloud

Computing Cloud Price War Breaks Out! - Talking Out Cloud — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:12:00 +0000

[...] lower than we see today in certain cases. It is unlikely that we will see prices take on the Moore’s Law effect some have associated with the cloud [...]

By: vitezslavvalka

vitezslavvalka — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 10:36:22 +0000

It’s too short time that this cloud services are here. They may just calibrate it.

By: Matthew Gertner

Matthew Gertner — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:12:51 +0000

If there is no lock in, and Amazon is using its status as the only viable offer to overcharge, wouldn’t cheaper competitors immediately appear? I don’t know what the truth is, but it seems more plausible to me that the lack of competition is precisely because Amazon is charging relatively low prices, leveraging the enormous scale of its server infrastructure.

None of this should prevent us from making fun of the French, of course.

By: Roman Stanek

Roman Stanek — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 15:01:31 +0000

Monopoly is measured by the market share and not by the level of openness. Many global telcos are monopolies while they deliver perfectly standard GSM and other open services.

I am not locked in AWS because it is proprietary but because there is no other alternative. Open provider with 100% market share is as bad as proprietary one with 1%. Both can use their market power to manipulate prices.

By: Simon Vostry

Simon Vostry — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 12:30:05 +0000

I was wondering a few weeks ago about the same – if there is any plan of Amazon to push down the price of EC2 more significantly. I tried to Google for “will amazon ec2 decrease prices” and Google replied by: Did you mean: “will amazon ec2 increase prices”? I find it kind of funny Almost seemed to me like if you Google “french military victories” and click the I’m feeling lucky button (or just following the first result)

By: David Engelmaier

David Engelmaier — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 23:32:30 +0000

You’re saying it’s likely the AWS is a monopoly environment on one hand and on the other hand you’re expressing your unwillingness of being “locked-in to proprietary Python or .Net libraries” which I understand as critics of the Google App Engine proprietary implementation mostly in the BigTable part of the stack. What exactly is the difference between deploying the environment of your choice into a monopolised AWS and using, as you say, proprietary Python or Java libraries on Google App Engine when you can’t switch to any alternative provider with ether solution?

By: Matthew Gertner

Matthew Gertner — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:49:12 +0000

According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#Ultimate_limits_of_the_law) Moore’s Law is still going strong and expected to do so for at least another decade.

By: Tzvika Barenholz

Tzvika Barenholz — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 20:56:07 +0000

They are not a monopoly, and Moore’s law stopped working a while ago for computer chips, so it makes sense that it won’t work for cloud computing, which in many ways is a derivative of – wait for it – computer chips!

By: Raphaël Bauduin

Raphaël Bauduin — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 18:49:06 +0000

Moore’s law certainly isn’t the only parameter on which to base such an analysis: what about energy consumption? If power doubles, but energy consumption doubles too (Whic doesn’t, I agree , your performance/price ratio stays the same.

There are also other maintenance costs. And I wonder how many servers they have and what their average life time is. It would be an interesting analysis to determine the optimal life length of a physical server in the AWS server farms.

There’s also an upfront investment that Amazon would be glad to get back.

And I’m sure there are tons of things that have to be added. But in the end, we certainly shoudl get more than 15% in 2 year.

By: Matthew Gertner

Matthew Gertner — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:26:56 +0000

Moore’s Law actually states that the density of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit will double roughly every two years. Clearly this has implications for the performance/price ratio of anything that depends on microprocessor power, but it doesn’t obviously apply directly to the technologies that underpin Amazon’s offer.

I wouldn’t go as far as to call AWS a monopoly, but you’re probably right that lack of competition has something to do with the relatively slow decline in their prices. But I suspect it has more to do with the fact that the current prices reflect a lot of things besides the cost of transistors (system admin costs, software development, bandwidth, etc.) and that these are dropping in price much more slowly.