Amazon DevPay: Getting Paid for Cloud Apps

Amazon DevPay is a simple-to-use billing and account management service that makes it easy for developers to get paid for applications they build on Amazon Web Services.

Amazon DevPay allows app providers to quickly sign up customers, automatically meter their usage of services, have Amazon bill users, and collect payments.

Amazon DevPay provides a simple Web interface for pricing applications based on any combination of up-front, recurring and usage-based fees.

To use Amazon DevPay, users develop using Amazon S3 or an Amazon EC2 Machine Image (AMI), register the apps with Amazon DevPay, provide a product description and configure your desired pricing.

The Amazon DevPay purchase pipeline is linked to the app Web site. Activity is
monitored on the Amazon DevPay Activity page.

There are no minimum fees and no setup charges. Activity is billed at three percent of the transaction amounts and $0.30 per bill generated.

Amazon SimpleDB: Boost for Cloud Computing

Amazon now offers SimpleDB, a Web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud.

Traditionally, this type of functionality has been accomplished with a clustered relational database that requires a sizable upfront investment. In contrast, Amazon SimpleDB is easy to use and provides the core functionality of a database--real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data--without the operational complexity.

Amazon SimpleDB automatically indexes data and provides a simple API for storage and access.

Amazon SimpleDB provides streamlined access to the lookup and query functions that traditionally are achieved using a relational database cluster, while leaving out other complex, often-unused database operations.

Amazon SimpleDB allows easy scaling of applications as well. For the Beta release, a single domain is limited in size to 10 gigabytes and 100 domains. Over time these limits may be raised, Amazon says.

The service runs within Amazon's high-availability data centers and fully indexed user data is stored redundantly across multiple servers and data centers.

Amazon SimpleDB is designed to integrate easily with other web-scale services such as Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3. For example, developers can run their applications in Amazon EC2 and store their data objects in Amazon S3. Amazon SimpleDB can then be used to query the object metadata from within the application in Amazon EC2 and return pointers to the objects stored in Amazon S3.

Developers and users pay only for what they use; there are no minimum fees.

Machine use costs $0.14 per Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hour consumed. Data transfer in
$0.10 per gigabyte. Data transfer out varies based on volume. Costs are $0.18 per GB for the first 10 TB per month; $0.16 per GB for the next 40 TB and $0.13 per GB over 50 TB.

Structured data storage costs $1.50 per GB-month.

The point is that it is becoming easier by the day to create, store and execute applications based entirely "in the cloud," without ownership or lease of data facilities, access pipes or servers to support those apps. At some point, highly-distributed workforces or end user bases will find it congenial in the extreme to support remote users with services always available through a standard Web browser, with the latest version, with no need for loading updates, patches or extensions.

As software becomes a service, computing infrastructure also is becoming a utility or service as well.

IT Staffing Crisis: Managed Services Opportunity

With only an estimated five million new workers entering a workforce in which twenty-five million will retire over the next twelve years, IT shops are facing an obvious personnel crisis, argue researchers at Ovum. "North American IT shops may well be facing a staffing perfect storm," says Tom Kucharvy, Ovum SVP.

Do the math: Lose 25 million; gain five million, for a net loss of 20 million IT personnel. Assuming technology and software continues to be more important in the future than in the past, it seems rather obvious that enterprise, small business and consumer technology support has to change, and change dramatically.

So is it not reasonable to assume that technology has to be made easier to use; support has to be virtualized (not delivered on site, by a technician)and software has to be delivered as a service?

Two big challenges are certain, Ovum argues. "The impending mass retirement of baby boomers will deplete staff and starve many companies of critical skills."

"Meanwhile, a shortage of replacements due to a smaller crop of college graduates and a dramatic decline in students planning to enter IT-related fields will compound the problem.

"Fundamentally reassessing the skills that will be needed over the next five to ten years rather than attempting to duplicate or replace current skills is the first strategic step companies must take immediately to address the issue," says Kucharvy.

GDrive: Cloud Computing

Google apprears to be prepping a storage service that would let users store online essentially all of the files they might keep on their local hard drives, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal. Users would gain mobility, remote backup and simple Web access to their information from virtually any broadband-connected device.

For Google, getting people to store data online makes it easier to get them to use productivity and other applications online. The possibly unanticipated impact is that enterprise computing architectures might change in this direction as well, as improbable as that may seem.

Cloud-based computing arguably is easier to manage and better adapted for supporting remote, traveling and dispersed workers, which is more the case every day.

Google is trying to let users upload and access files directly from their PC desktops and have the file storage behave for consumers more like another hard drive that is handy at all times, say the people familiar with the matter.

Of course, one limitation of such an Internet-based storage service is offline access.

Google is hoping the new storage service will help tie together some of its other services through a single search box, allowing a single search by keywords to find privately stored files, regardless of whether they're accessed through Picasa, Docs or a software program running on the user's computer.

Google appears to be moving toward being able to "store 100% of user data."