One of the key selling points of Amazon’s EC2 capacity is its ability to turn CAPEX costs into OPEX costs. Or, for those of us who didn’t major in business in college, to pay for computer hardware with the “Pay For Services” budget, instead of the “Buy Stuff” budget.
This is generally a good thing – but now Amazon’s trying something else that might lower costs even more, while selling Amazon’s cloud computing overstock – they’re going to auction off unused virtual server capacity. Since the server capacity changes with supply and demand – so would the price, theoretically.
Here’s how it works. You bid a price, and if the price is more than the “spot price,” you pay the spot price. If the spot price rises higher than your bid, however, your instances are terminated. According to Network World:
Since Spot Instances can be terminated without warning, once a customer is outbid, they shouldn’t be the only source of capacity allocated to enterprise applications that need 24/7 uptime.
No kidding. I could see the Spot Instances being used for some additional oomph in computational tasks, but I wouldn’t want any sort of persistent application running on that thing. I’d hate to wake up one morning to find out that my company can’t get e-mail because “whurleybird3289” outbid me by one cent…
On the other hand, there are plenty of applications that could use that oomph – video cluster rendering, astrophysics models, the B-Movie Idea Generator (used by Revolution Studios, mostly…)
Ultimately, the entire idea seems to embrace cloud computing’s core competence: low expense, while exacerbating its core drawback – low(er) reliability.
There’s also another problem – security. Recently, a Zeus/Zbot Trojan which used a compromised EC2 virtual server for command and control – the first of its kind.
“This is the first instance that we’re aware of that EC2 has been compromised to be used to distribute malware,” [Don DeBolt, Director of Threat Research for CA Internet Security Business Unit] said. “So it certainly should raise awareness. Anytime that you use a cloud-based service or a host infrastructure or applications, that increases the complexity of what you’re trying to do. And if the access and application controls are not maintained securely, then it opens it up to potential compromise.”
Cloud computing is great, but there are drawbacks and not being able to control every element of your network performance is one of them.
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