{"id":478,"date":"2006-08-24T11:58:02","date_gmt":"2006-08-24T15:58:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2006\/08\/24\/is-amazon-eating-suns-lunch\/"},"modified":"2006-08-24T11:58:02","modified_gmt":"2006-08-24T15:58:02","slug":"is-amazon-eating-suns-lunch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2006\/08\/24\/is-amazon-eating-suns-lunch\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Amazon eating Sun’s lunch?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Amazon doesn’t get a whole lot of love from the “Web 2.0” crowd most of the time — perhaps because it’s kind of a Web 1.0 company that just sells books and other stuff, and happens to use the Web to do it. The giant retailer has added some wiki-type features and other interactivity, but other than that it’s pretty much just a retailer. Bo-ring. Except, of course, for the odd announcement like this one<\/a>, about Amazon providing what amounts to “grid computing” services — a distributed server network that Web companies can effectively use as their own back-end network. <\/p>\n

Nik Cubrilovic, who is a smart guy and runs a Web-based backup company called OmniDrive, has the details<\/a> at TechCrunch. Apparently (warning: I am not a hardware guy), companies can effectively create a virtual server structured in any way they wish and then upload that image to Amazon’s equipment — that is, its S3 network<\/a> — and then their service treats that virtual server as though it was just down the hall in a machine room. Users are charged for CPU usage and bandwidth at what appear to be fairly competitive rates (although Nik has some concerns there). We Break Stuff likes it<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This sounds a lot like what Sun Microsystems has been trying to do with its Grid Computing solution<\/a>, which the struggling server maker — which put the dot in Web 1.0, to paraphrase its famous slogan — launched in 2004, but has apparently had some trouble<\/a> getting rolling (and getting customers<\/a> for). By way of a quick comparison, Amazon charges 10 cents per CPU hour for its service, while Sun charges $1 per CPU hour — although I’m sure there are differences of which I am not aware. Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz wrote a blog post with some background about Sun’s grid efforts back in March<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/b><\/p>\n

There’s a good look at and discussion of Amazon’s EC2 here<\/a>, and some good comments about its benefits and\/or weaknesses at the Reddit page about the announcement here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Amazon doesn’t get a whole lot of love from the “Web 2.0” crowd most of the time — perhaps because it’s kind of a Web 1.0 company that just sells books and other stuff, and happens to use the Web to do it. The giant retailer has added some wiki-type features and other interactivity, but … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Is Amazon eating Sun’s lunch?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}