Interesting. Also interesting what is simply an artifact from the fact that none of the current "clouds" out there were built to deal with, well, actual loads.

Interesting. Also interesting what is simply an artifact from the fact that none of the current "clouds" out there were built to deal with, well, actual loads. Some things are small, but seem rather strange. Why does no cloud give out 95/5 billing? Why isn't there more resource limiting/etc? I see a bunch of things leaking out of EC2. People forget that EC2 was designed to deal with large numbers of stateless servers and it's not good for much else. They take the limitations of that and the rest of the AWS platform and apply it to the 'cloud' overall. Two examples would be from the 'variability' section. CPU limiting under XEN (the hypervisor used by both Amazon and Rackspace) is trivial. The fact that CPU is so variable, especially for smaller tiers, is thus rather interesting. Similarly with IO. With Rackspace, you are on local disks. As such, unlike Amazon, Rackspace has no defendable reason for being able to starve other users of disk IO. Also, just as a general data point. There is no real reason why a cloud should be in the same order of magnitude of cost as anything you could touch. Fairly simple reasoning, everything they buy is at massive scale, and there is a very minimal fixedish management cost to deal with all the hardware. What you can work out is that even given almost list prices you are still looking at thousands of percent ROI on cloud servers. What that then says about the market is that there is a current monopoly due to a lack of cloudsmithing knowhow which is the cause of the current situation. Over time, I would expect cloud products to simply dominate standard dedicated servers/colocated servers for most applications.