Amazon undercuts Google's cloud prices - providing you can pay up front

Amazon has introduced a way to pay for cloud infrastructure that undercuts Google – provided you're willing to shell out up front towards at least one year of use.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has changed the way it charges for its Reserved Instance (RI) compute infrastructure on its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). EC2 customers pay for Reserved Instance infrastructure whether they use it or not, unlike EC2's On Demand Instances.

The charges for Reserved Instances are no longer split into light, medium and heavy usage but instead reflect how much a user is willing to pay up front.

Users can chose to pay no up-front costs, or some or all of the costs up front, and must commit to paying for one or three years of usage. A table produced by the cloud portfolio management company RightScale summarises the available payment options below.

The new payment options for EC2 Reserved Instances. Image: RightScale

RightScale has compared the cost of using the new RIs with renting infrastructure via Google Compute Engine. It put the cost of RIs against that of Google's Sustained-Use instances, which it said was the closest apples-to-apples comparison.

No up-front cost RIs compare less favourably, with Google working out 11 to 30 percent cheaper depending on the configuration of the virtual machine. RightScale points out, however, that some of the EC2 instances used in the comparison are based on higher-spec hardware, with AWS offering more memory on the high-memory instances and twice the memory on the high-CPU instances, along with an SSD, which it says "balances Google's lower price".

Image: RightScale

AWS also offers additional volume discounts for RIs, which start at five percent when the annual value of RIs reaches $500,000, and ranges up to 10 percent when the annual value reaches $4m.

Another distinction is that RIs demand a commitment to use them for one year, whereas Google Sustained Use model requires no usage commitment.

It is when customers commit to paying part or all of the costs up front that EC2 instances work out cheaper than Google.

The cost of renting a RI for one-year and paying partial costs up front works out one to 14 percent cheaper than comparable offerings from Google, says RightScale. RIs are up to 38 percent cheaper if a customer commits for three years and pays all costs up front, the comparison claims.

Image: RightScale

However, RightScale warn customers that there may be significant cuts to charges for on-demand instances during those three years, as well as the introduction of new more powerful instance types.

When comparing the cost of EC2 RIs to other EC2 on-demand instances, the time it takes before the RI begins saving you money depends on the commitment term.

RightScale found it takes 261 days to break even for a one-year, no up-front costs RI; 226 days for a one-year, partial up-front RI; and 222 days for a one-year, all up-front RI. A three-year, partial up-front RI took 435 days to break even, and a three-year, all up-front took 409 days.

Image: RightScale

AWS has faced increasing competition on price from Google and Microsoft in the cloud infrastructure market. Last month Google pledged to reduce the price of some of its offerings by between 23 and 79 percent.

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Google streamlines seller programs for Work, Education cloud apps

Nearing the end of a year that saw Google greatly strenghen its cloud and enterprise portfolios, Google Apps partners are getting some extra attention as well.

The Internet giant introduced a new partner scheme converging the Work and Education arms of the Google Apps platform.

Now dubbed as simply the Google for Work and Education Partner Program, the integrated suite combines programs for selling and supporting Apps, Chrome, Cloud Platform, Maps and Search into one offering.

But within that one offering are a few distinct track options based on partner and customer needs.

These start with basic marketing and selling Google for Work and Education, building upon that with training and other support services, and finally the development of additional software products designed to work on top of Google for Work and Education apps.

If that's not enough, Google is also flaunting a "premier" track tier for partners that have "demonstrated higher levels of excellence within their track."

Murali Sitaram, director of global partnerships and strategic alliances on the Google for Work team, explained some of the benefits to the premier track in a blog post on Thursday, highlighting exclusive events and "other financial incentives."

"Partners help customers move, live and grow in the cloud by taking full advantage of the Google for Work and Education suite of products," Sitaram wrote. "They onboard and train new customers, manage change, create specialized software to integrate with Google Apps and develop unique solutions using Google Maps and Google Cloud Platform."

Google for Work, the business-focused unit formerly known as Google Enterprise, was previously upgraded back in October with the intention of providing better customer support to its corporate user base with a focus on chat and in-product assistance.

Last week, while most Internet users were likely more concerned about the security of retail and other consumer-related sites, Google for Work was also given a security booster shot with a new Devices and Activity dashboard.

The application window for the Google for Work and Education Partner Program is scheduled to open in early 2015.

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Cloud crucial for Service NSW

This year's launch of the one-stop shop for New South Wales government services known as Service NSW was only possible thanks to the government's decision to adopt cloud services.

Service NSW, which launched in July this year, brings together a number of different NSW government services under the one office, including Roads and Maritime; Births, Deaths, and Marriages; and small business support.

Speaking at the CeBIT GovInnovate conference last week, the agency's IT director of business development Jacqui McPherson said that 400 shop fronts were reduced to 21 one-stop shops across NSW as of December, with a plan to roll out to 36 by the end of June next year.

It was only through the use of cloud services, McPherson said, that the NSW government was able to set up an IT department in eight weeks to meet the launch deadline of July 1.

"We built up an IT organisation including a CRM [customer relationship management], Office 365, and later a Genesys telephony platform, each within six to eight weeks of initial design. This would not have been achievable if we weren't using cloud-based platforms," she said.

"What cloud gave us, very simply, a model we could deliver within our cost restraints. There was a lower startup cost, and a lower exit cost for government if it didn't work.

"It also gave us the ability to trial, to experiment, and to change quickly. We could be nimble and agile where we needed to be."

There was still a level of "sticky tape" that needed to be applied to Service NSW, McPherson said, with the new cloud-based systems needing to access the data of the old legacy systems, such as the driver's licence systems.

Service NSW also didn't initially have access to its own datacentre, so initially for the pilot in Kiama, the datacentre was hosted in the Kiama communications room, while the agency took another three months to build out the datacentre.

"We did need to be agile in all places. Cloud also gives us the ability to support our business objectives and scale quickly," McPherson said.

Service NSW uses Genesys for the call centre, Salesforce for the CRM system, and Office 365. NEC is managing the deployment of the contact centre. McPherson said that there are more features in the platforms than the business could handle at this stage.

"The interesting thing about these particular clouds ... is that there is so much capability to be released that we have to hold back, because the capability of these systems and the products is more than the business can absorb at one time," she said.

"So we've now slowed down the rate of change into our service delivery channels. We've found that IT in some areas is faster than the business' ability to absorb change."

A key component in meeting the government's targets was aligning the vendor service-level agreements with that of Services NSW. This ensured that the services were delivered on time and on budget. McPherson said that using cloud services took some of the burden off government for security.

"Cloud providers have more resources to invest in their enterprise security and systems than government does. It is their business, and it is not ours. So we have made sure that as we have built out cloud into our enterprise architecture, we have clearly defined what those boundaries are around data, around security, and around risks," she said.

The Kiama pilot also had issues at its launch event featuring the New South Wales Premier Mike Baird. McPherson said that someone had said there would be free Wi-Fi at the centre without informing the IT team.

"At the last minute, I think in the last couple of hours, we had a new mobile phone under the counter, with a new mobile hotspot for all customers," she said.

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Building an analytics cloud on OpenShift

Communication and collaboration between development and operations can be difficult to achieve in many organizations, especially in larger environments. These two areas have traditionally operated within 'silos' separate from each other - something that can lead to delays and miscommunication.

These issues can be rectified, however, thanks to capable new tools and technologies such as OpenStack and OpenShift.

In fact, predictive analytics and decision management software company FICO recently deployed OpenShift Enterprise, Red Hat's private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering.

Focusing on analytics

Analytics is a vital field for many companies, given the benefits that can be seen when data is effectively utilized (market and customer trend understanding). In many cases, companies move into the field for basic trend analysis through to more complicated predictive analytics.

FICO offers analytic software and tools that help organizations make smarter decisions.

FICO has been a leader in this space for more than 50 years, and offers solutions to help companies solve different analytics issues. When it came time to deploy the FICO Analytic Cloud, FICO required a more capable and adaptable PaaS solution, and turned to OpenShift Enterprise.

OpenShift, OpenStack and FICO

FICO needed a reliable platform on which to deploy the FICO Analytic Cloud, one that could be built and scaled as needed to meet demand. OpenShift Enterprise, the award-winning private PaaS solution, was identified as the best option for FICO.

OpenShift Enterprise is an on-premise, private PaaS that enables applications to be delivered quickly. OpenShift Enterprise also enables users to improve both developer productivity and operational efficiency. The CIO of FICO, Tony McGivern, explained that they found OpenShift to be the best platform capable to deliver the results required, helping FICO to reduce application development time by 70 per cent.

"The relationship we have with those who support OpenShift is more than I could have ever asked for," said McGivern. "I can make one phone call and have a SWAT team assembled within an hour. And when you're living in a new, innovative, highly advanced model like we are today, that's a great source of security."

"Platform-as-a-Service is such a powerful technology, and FICO is an amazing example of a customer that has used OpenShift to not only transform their internal development organization, but also to bring their product to market," said Ashesh Badani, vice president and general manager, OpenShift, Red Hat.

"FICO has reduced time to value for developing analytic solutions by up to 70% versus on-premise software."

-- Tony McGivern, CIO, FICO

The need for PaaS

PaaS is a powerful technology capable of meeting the fault tolerance and availability needs of modern companies. In addition, a correctly implemented solution can accomplish auto-scaling - something that's key for developers.

Of course, companies need to have confidence in their ability to provide the necessary virtual machine resources to PaaS solutions. OpenShift offers tools for rapid platform scaling, providing an 'elastic infrastructure'.

DevOps-enabling tools will continue to prove essential for organizations across the globe, streamlining the way in which developers and and operators work together. Combined with capable PaaS solutions, organizations can find it easier to achieve DevOps goals.

Learn more about FICO's OpenShift Enterprise story.Watch FICO's success story.Read more about DevOps and how Red Hat can help you develop your own DevOps strategy.

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DevOps a natural fit for cloud security

DevOps is pretty much the work of the devil. Why on earth would you let developers -- people who tinker and fiddle and crash things as they struggle to get complex software to work properly -- anywhere near productions systems that need to maintain a bunch of nines of reliability? This fad must die.

At least, that was the core of my thinking, as someone influenced by old-school notions of reliable systems and network administration, until a recent conversation with Dr Nataraj (Raj) Nagaratnam, chief technology officer for IBM's Security Solutions division.

"You're right, I don't think you want developers near your stuff, because they don't know how to operate it, but it is the exchange of knowledge that is critical," Nagaratnam told ZDNet.

"We're used to building stuff and sending it over the wall for the operations team to run it. But in cloud, what is happening is that it becomes a more continuous delivery model, and the linkage between the application development and operations teams is becoming much more integrated," he said.

"As a developer, I don't know what I don't know in operations, and I'm learning [by] working with system administrators. And our operations guys are learning much more about the reason for our business applications, and what we are delivering... If the production system goes down, they know what part of the business it affects and what the criticality is."

It's more of a collaborative model, Nagaratnam said, and the main difficulty they've run into while implementing this model at IBM is not technology, but rather culture.

Developers also need to think about designing layered resilience into every aspect of an application. Applications must be designed to expect failure, and degrade gracefully when it happens.

"I think that mentality is also changing, and needs to change."

Designing a database, say, is now more than just designing its schema. If an application runs a query that returns 1 million records, but only half get delivered before being interrupted by a network glitch, what happens?

"Instead of reloading everything, can the design account for that? That's a development mentality," Nagaratnam said.

"If there is a new feature to be done in the holiday season, they can't wait for the overall process to go through for four weeks. They just don't have the time. [It's] the ability to say, 'Can I incrementally deliver that particular feature in that particular virtual machine, or web front end, or mobile front end? How can I do that, as opposed to thinking the entire IT is a black box?"

On the operations side, operators need to know enough about the internal architecture of an application to know how its moving parts interact to deliver the customer interaction.

If there's a spike in mobile access, say, resulting in a spike in encryption and user authentication load, then the operators need to know enough about the application's business logic to respond.

"They don't need to know all the details -- but the fact that in order to have the quality of service, with the resiliency and security in mind, what is it that they need to do?" Nagaratnam said.

Glen Gooding, director of IBM's Institute of Advanced Security, said that the closer collaboration and layered resilience of this model can lead to better security.

"If the underlying security infrastructure is there, you've got more assurance that your applications will be less prone to any sort of external attack," Gooding told ZDNet.

Finally, this layered approach in the technology stack leads to a layered approach in the way risk is handled -- which also leads to better security.

"CISOs used to need to make the risk call, and what controls need to be put in place for everything, but that's completely changing," he said.

Nagaratnam said CISOs are now telling the business units that they're the ones who understand the data, the application, and the risk appetite, and CISOs are effectively saying: "You tell me what the risk is, I'll tell you what the policies and controls are."

"The line of business has skin in the game... They start to understand the pain of a CISO, and start to figure out how to address security in a better fashion."

"The CISO is no longer the one that is accountable. It starts to be more collaborative... You can either call it decentralised governance, or you can call it more collaborative governance, depending on how we view it."

Collaboration and communication can improve security? Who knew? Maybe DevOps isn't so bad, after all.

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Google Cloud Platform certified for payment card data amid deal with WePay

Summary: Rolling out amid what is still the busiest shopping season of the year, Google is expanding its cloud once again with two significant e-commerce developments.By Rachel King for Between the Lines | December 2, 2014 -- 17:52 GMT
Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2014 -- as lackluster as they might have actually been -- are now behind us, but the need to protect consumer data only continues.
Rolling out amid what is still the busiest shopping season of the year, Google is expanding its cloud once again with two significant e-commerce developments.
The first piece of the puzzle is that Google Cloud Platform is now certified for satisfying Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standards (DSS).
This means retailers and other businesses can store, process, or exchange cardholder information from any branded credit card on Google Cloud Platform -- a major coup for Google against online retail titan and cloud foe Amazon and its Web Services department.
"PCI DSS provides a comprehensive and robust security framework for securing credit card information and transactions," wrote Matthew O’Connor, a product manager on the Google Cloud Platform team, in a blog post on Tuesday. "Google is using these third-party audited standards to deliver a platform on which application developers can create and operate their own secure and compliant solutions."
Thanks to PCI validation, the Google Cloud Platform has been tapped by online payment service provider WePay as its official public cloud provider.
WePay primarily serves digital marketplaces, crowdfunding sites, and small businesses through a payments API but also provides loss and fraud protection.
David Nye, director of DevOps at WePay, explained further in a separate statement on Tuesday that WePay is counting on Google Cloud Platform to provide a scalable, highly available, and -- most importantly -- secure environment for processing partner transactions.
"Moving our hosting entirely into the cloud is something we’ve wanted to do for a long time," Nye posited. "It will enable us to add more servers in seconds to deal with spikes in demand and give us more flexibility to do systems maintenance without impacting our customers."
Topics: Data Management, Cloud, E-Commerce, Privacy, Security
Rachel King is a staff writer for ZDNet based in San Francisco.
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