Cloud is getting cheap and boring: It’s about time says Nodeable blog, citing new Windows Azure price points: “Windows Azure Extra Small Compute has been reduced by 50% ($.04 to .$02)” This compares with Amazon small ECU spot price of 2.7 cents.
… but we are not there yet.
Greg Arnette review AWS price history and finds:
Per-unit hourly rates for each ECU type have gone down over the previous 5 years (by 15% per unit cost). But in addition to this, there are two other significant factors that have lowered costs even more than the 15% unit cost reduction. These are SPOT pricing and Reserved Instances. For cloud orientated architectures that can take advantage of SPOT and Reserved, costs can be decreased by more than 60%.
This is a smaller reduction than might be expected, given Moore’s Law. And here’s a further problem – Is EC2 spot instance a real spot market?. Maybe not (see also “Debunking Real-Time Pricing in Cloud Computing”. Large instances So, the cloud is getting cheaper, but it really needs to get on a faster Moore’s law price descent to become the ‘boring’ utility that fulfils the promise of cloud computing.