Emergency

My son was returning to college a few nights ago. He is an organized person. He meticulously planned every detail for his return. He even reinstalled everything on his laptop to ensure that his system would be in prime condition for his senior year. Just before we headed out the door, his laptop crashed so hard that we could not get the system out of 'safe' mode. We only had time for reinstalling the OS and packing up the rest of the application installation CDs before we left.

His data backup was located on an external hard drive that is used to backup all of our systems. I imagined the condition of the external hard drive after it made the round trip to school and back in his duffel bag. I could not ensure that the drive would be kept secure in an apartment with three roommates and their many friends. I could not let the hard drive out of my control. We made plans for his return trip this weekend to restore his data. We rushed out the door.

While returning home that night, I remembered discussions that I was having with the Cloudberry Lab folks about their AWS S3 tools, a browser (S3 Explorer) and an online backup utility (Backup). They had asked me to kick the tires and let them know what I thought about their products. I had my trusty S3 account. "Just maybe", I thought, "I could use Cloudberry Backup to transfer my son's backup files to S3 and then have my son recover his files from S3".

I downloaded Cloudberry Backup the next morning. The set up was easy. I followed the straight forward backup wizard to create the back up script. I selected all of his files, all 21 GB of them. I fired up Cloudberry Backup and off it went copying his files to S3. I noticed that the progress indicator wasn't exactly zipping up to 100% complete. I clicked on details to see that my upload capacity was sitting right at 250KB per second. At this rate, the transfer would take a day. I easily halted the transfer and edited the backup to select 1GB of his most important files. I started the backup again. Within an hour, his files were on S3. I sent a note to him to download Cloudberry Backup and configure it for my S3 account. He was successful and had access to his files. Not bad for a pre-med student. Not bad for Cloudberry and the cloud.

The flexing capability of the cloud enables consumers to use what they need when they need it. While this use case was a desktop application tethered to a cloud storage service, the access to what I needed when I needed it solved the problem. Even with the best of planning, Murphy strikes. The ability to request an extra CPU instance, web server, replicant, IP address or volume when capacity planning fails will continue to propel interest in the cloud. There's no (or little) price to be paid for this latent capacity.

This situation has caused me to realize that I need an on-line backup service. I'll be doing some more shopping around. I hope that the Cloudberry tools plus AWS S3 holds up to the comparison because I liked the Backup usage model and its coupling with my AWS account.

In case you're wondering what field of medicine my son is pursuing, it's Emergency Medicine.


For the record, I have not received any compensation from Cloudberry beyond using the free Cloudberry Backup (BETA) software.

Safe Bet

Microsoft's Azure pricing was announced earlier this month. There have been a few blog posts publishing the numbers and comparing prices. The bottom line is that pretty much[1] Microsoft priced their offerings at price parity with Amazon Web Services. The question that kept coming to mind was 'Why parity?'.

Microsoft has market dominance, a relatively captive developer audience, large data center experience, and cash. Azure is designed to remotely run customer code under their control on Microsoft's software stacks. The Azure developer experience is similar in style to the desktop development experience. Azure should be efficient since they are leveraging Microsoft's massive data centers and operational expertise. They have the capital for a prolonged battle.

Meanwhile, AWS prices have been relatively fixed for some time. AWS storage and small-compute instances have remained the same for years. While Amazon has offered new services like reserved instances at lower prices, and tiered outgoing bandwidth prices, the US pricing has remained unchanged. This is an amazing feat given how technology prices fall over time. Sounds like a pricing target to me.

Why not get banner headlines by undercutting AWS? Governments would not blink if Microsoft took on the world's largest on-line retailer on price. Would they? Azure is late and behind. Wouldn't lower prices demonstrate that Microsoft is serious about Azure and Cloud Computing? Azure has the benefit of using modern hardware in a market with two year old pricing. Microsoft has their own large data centers in low cost locations. Couldn't Azure use these for their advantage? If anyone could take on AWS on price, Azure could do it.

Why wasn't Azure's pricing set lower? I don't know the answer. I suspect that, years ago, AWS set aggressive, forward-looking prices based on future efficiencies that they felt they would achieve. They have pretty much executed on plan. If so, there isn't much pricing room for a newcomer to undercut them. Given the large capital investments, automation complexities, low price-per-unit, high unit volumes, and thin margins, any small pricing mistake will compound and drastically affect the bottom line. Azure went with the safe bet, pricing parity.

AWS's pricing may be one the greatest barriers to entry for the next generation of computing. If so, talk about beginner's luck.

[1] There may be a few exceptions with Microsoft's Web Role and SQL Azure. Web Role and AWS CloudWatch price difference may be based on different technical approaches and the resources used, with Web Role potentially being the higher of the two. The SQL Azure price per month has processing and storage bundled, whereas, SimpleDB prices storage and compute component based upon actual usage per month.