Posts Tagged ‘Amazon Web Services’

Cloud computing is definitely here to stay. As web accesibility improves on a nearly daily basis so too does the potential for cloud computing concepts to be applied to more areas of corporate IT and provide new business solutions. As companies rush to capitalise on the new options available to them, the question is; what can cloud computing do for small business? And what does the longer term picture look like?

(Broadly speaking, the term refers to the transfer of application running and data storage processes away from individually owned client computers to centrally run and maintained systems, which are then accessed by users/clients/businesses on a pay-per-use basis via the web. For a more detailed description see the Wikipedia link at the start of this article).

So, almost exactly one month after Google launched their App Engine, Amazon Web Services (AWS) have announced a considerable bandwidth price reduction. Google’s rival to AWS is still only in a closed beta release stage, but it has nonetheless already impacted positively on the breadth of options available to programmers - and now also contributed to reducing costs.

Amazon are unlikely to openly concede that their price cut is a response to the launch of Google’s free rival, but there can be no doubt that the reduction will make AWS more competitive against the GAE (N.B. the AWS price cuts are significant; heavier users could save somewhere in the region of 25%).