Amazon EC2 now available in Enterprise Rip-off Editions
Who doesn’t love Amazon EC2? I have two EC2 AMIs on speed dial - both Debian stable AMIs, one with a full LAMP stack, and the other with a Rails stack. They’re brilliant for emergencies: when servers fall over. They are also brilliant for things like Hack Days and BarCamps, where you need cheap, temporary hosting for a few days. I’ve yet to need one in production, as I use a VPS provider who tend to be a bit cheaper until one hits a certain level of popularity. (I’ve had good experiences with Linode recently.) If I ever build an app that’s popular enough to need to scale up quickly and easily, Amazon EC2 is where I’m going to turn. It’s a tremendously useful tool in the box of any web developer.
What’s interesting is that running a free Linux distribution like Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Arch or Red Hat Enterprise or whatever costs $0.10 an hour, or a small premium if one wants the servers to be hosted in Europe rather than the U.S. You can get them to host Windows servers too: the price for that is a little bit higher at $0.125, for which you get access to a machine running Windows Server 2003 with Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and Internet Information Services (IIS) 6. You then have to pay for all the “premium services”: Authentication Services, SQL Server Standard and so on. If you want Microsoft SQL Server, they start at $1.10 per hour.
Amazon have just introduced IBM AMIs. Like the Windows AMIs, you pay a premium to use AMIs that are pre-licensed. This time, they are IBM’s various enterprise products: DB2 Express, DB2 Workgroup, Informix Dynamic Server Express, Informix Dynamic Server Workgroup, WebSphere sMash, Lotus Web Content Management Server and WebSphere Portal Server. The prices range from $0.38 per hour, then to $0.50 an hour, $1.31 an hour, $2.48 an hour and finally a whopping $6.39 an hour for WebSphere Portal Server and Lotus Web Content Management Server running on the same AMI.
Now, I am not going to suggest that this is uneconomical for people who use these products already. I don’t know how much the software costs on a non-cloud basis. Similarly, there may be people who build software on top of the IBM enterprise server platforms who, during the development phase, may find Amazon a much cheaper way to prototype and build software.
But just look at those prices. Is Cloud Computing affordable? At $0.10 an hour, hell yeah! What EC2 is going to do is actually show people the prices of various enterprise and closed-source alternatives to the LAMP/Java/Rails/Django stack. And some of them will come back with “Why do I want to pay $6.39 for WebSphere Portal Server and Lotus Web Content Management Server when I can pay $0.10 an hour for a Linux box with as many free and open-source magic ponies as I like?”
It’s time to be honest: closed-source is dead on the server (and, by dead, I mean that in the Steve Gillmor sense). I’ve just developed an “enterprise” app in Rails in about the same time that the IT department have spent keeping their Windows servers alive. Four weeks of Rails by a non-expert (I have kept an eye on Rails for a couple of years, but this is the first non-trivial app I’ve built) and we have something that’s more natural and intuitive than the Microsoft solution - which would have been some kind of hacked together Visual Basic for Applications or Microsoft Project calamity.
Closed-source will still rule on the desktop for some time, and even more so on the laptop. But here’s how I imagine my computing universe now: a large number of boxes running Debian, with me on a Mac administering them all, and very occasionally booting up Windows (XP, of course) for some Win32 legacy usage and gaming. I’d love for Linux to become desktop ready. For that, we need a few things: less bloated window managers (I like Xfce, but I tend to find myself using GNOME), things like wifi and 3G need to just work, something a lot more like iTunes for all us iPod-toting potential switchers (and not just music: it needs to do all the podcast, audiobook and video stuff that iTunes does properly). Someone needs to firmly boot nVidia up the arse and get them to release open-source drivers. And there’s other little things: a decent news aggregator (as good as NetNewsWire), Bluetooth support that’s as simple to use as the Mac, and design that’s subtle. A while back, Ian was always trying to convince me that Linux is as “sweet” as OS X when it comes to visual effects, and showed me a rich panopoly of visual effects as part of the Compiz suite: the infamous “wobbly windows”. But having 10,000 visual effects downloadable from an SVN repository does not beauty make. It’s about tastefulness and subtlety. It’s something that OS X has which Linux needs to emulate.
Here’s an example: Apple have a suite of three productivity applications called iWork which are compatible with Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, but aren’t OpenOffice-style clones of these apps. They are subtle and smart alternatives designed not to emulate the Office feature set, but to be compelling alternatives.
The Linux desktop reminds me of the Mozilla suite before Firefox - what’s now called SeaMonkey. SeaMonkey is pretty cool in that you can actually run something that looks and feels like Netscape 4 Communicator, but it have all the modern gubbins underneath. Anyhow, before Firefox, the Mozilla suite was used by nerds, but it took a dramatic cleanup and rebranding operation and a big focus on user experience design before Firefox emerged out the other side, suitable for my mum to use. If you want Linux on everybody’s desktop in twenty years time, that process needs to be done on everything - that means Rhythmbox, AmaroK, F-Spot, OpenOffice and so on.
Anyway, I better stop prattling on about this and do some work.
