A Revolution in Cloud Pricing: Minute By Minute Cloud Billing for Everyone by Sean Murphy.
From the post:
Google IO wrapped up last week with a tremendous number of data-related announcements. Today’s post is going to focus on Google Compute Engine (GCE), Google’s answer to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) that allows you to create and run virtual compute instances within Google’s cloud. We have spent a good amount of time talking about GCE in the past, in particular, benchmarking it against EC2 here, here, here, and here.
The main GCE announcement at IO was, of course, the fact that now **anyone** and **everyone** can try out and use GCE. Yes, GCE instances now support up to 10 terabytes per disk volume, which is a BIG deal. However, the fact that GCE will use minute-by-minute pricing, which might not seem incredibly significant on the surface, is an absolute game changer.
Let’s say that I have a job that will take just a thousand instances each a little bit over an hour to finish (a total of just over a thousand “instance hours”). I launch my thousand instances, run the needed job, and then shut down my cloud 61 minutes later. Let’s also assume that Amazon and Google both charge about the same amount, say $0.50 per instance per hour (a relatively safe assumption) and that Amazon’s and Google’s instances have the same computational horsepower (this is not true, see my benchmark results). As Amazon charges by the hour, Amazon would charge me for two hours per instance or $1000.00 total (1000 instances x $0.50 per instance per hour x 2 hours per instance) whereas Google would only charge me $508.34 (1000 instances x $0.50 per instance per hour x 61/60 hours per instance). In this circumstance, Amazon’s hourly billing has almost doubled my costs but the impact is far worse.
Sean does a great job covering the impact of minute-by-minute pricing for cloud computing.
Great news for the short run and I suspect even greater news for the long run.
What happens when instances and storage become too cheap to meter?
Like domestic long distance telephone service.
When anything that can be computed is within the reach of everyone, what will be computed?