Much debate has been sparked in light of recent announcements from Yahoo and Best Buy that telecommuting is no longer an option. InfoWorld’s David Linthicum wrote an article this week about the use of cloud computing by a remote workforce. David says cloud computing can benefit distributed employees. With our “ScienceLogicians” spread across the globe and customers whose employees work in vast locations, we agree.
Cloud price wars are once again a hot topic with Amazon Web Services cutting prices on reserved instances by “up to 27%” for virtual servers running Linux/Unix. The price cut is making headway in showing Linux to be cheaper than running Windows on EC2. In his InformationWeek.com article, Charlie Babcock says the price reduction has the “benefit of making it more difficult for competitors to match pricing on AWS’s EC2 instance offerings…” Your move Microsoft.
Another interesting AWS price move this week is the announcement that a month-long free trial of Trusted Advisor is available. Trusted Advisor is a cloud services monitoring tool that aggregates operational history for AWS customers. Great, we’re all about getting more and better metrics. Customers need to see the full picture and Amazon is an important part of that. However, Amazon isn’t known for their management, as we all know, this is not their space. What they’re all about is offering elastic compute. With the addition of monitoring, is this the beginning of managed services from Amazon?