The Cost of Cloud in the Sky Computing Part 1

July 25, 2008 · Filed Under Estimating, General, IT Estimating, Software Estimating, Thoughts  - 2 Comment(s)

Looking at ways to increase IT infrastructure without worrying about power, heat, space and other constraints…. Cloud in the sky computing (or cloud computing) may be an upcoming solution. Cloud in the sky essentially is buying.

Cloud computing can be defined as:  an environment offering variable computing capacity and storage resources with dynamic provisioning and billing to support such real-time demands – a highly elastic response to demand changes along with a seemingly infinite pool of available resources.

Costs in Cloud Computing are generally measured in a usage-based formula.  A cloud may be in the public or or corporation specific, behind their firewall.

Amazon Web Services is an example. Costs, as I understand them are about $0.10 per hour of usage plus storage costs at $.15 per gig per month for a clone of an HP Tower server. If an application is hosted and not used there is no cost. Not bad. I suppose we could add to the advantages that they back up the whole system without you worrying about it. On the other hand, your data is out of your control.

Galorath recently did a study of the costs / benefits of force.com, Salesforce’s environment with some similarities to Amazon. I need to find out if our results are publishable. But I can tell you we found force. com to be attractive in the appropriate environment.

We will use SEER for IT to do a general analysis of cloud versus local computers soon.


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Comments

2 Responses to “The Cost of Cloud in the Sky Computing Part 1”

  1. Lee on August 8th, 2008 2:14 pm

    Cloud computing is an indistinct, typically large cluster of indistinct (virtualized) machines which provide utility-style access to computational resources. ‘Cloud in the sky’ computing is what I plan on painting on my 3 year old’s wall.

  2. Cloud Applications… « Cyber Means Pilot on April 9th, 2009 9:54 am

    [...] several of the clouds of information through a “load-bearing” distribution system. Sky computing would reduce the load present on server farm and would allow from simpler method for backing up [...]

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