Solstra,Stuart Bonell, consultancy, CTO, CIO, programme management, IT infrastructure, cloud, cloud computing, iaas, paas, saas, data centre, data center
I'm not sure I can agree with you at all on cost, all current ngferiofs are 2-3x more expensive than if you did it myself, which is a major expense. You are paying for the same things they are paying for, with less of a break for less bulk, but the services still have to be paid for. Then they charge you a surcharge of top of those services.All cloud ngferiofs are significantly more expensive than if I ran those operations physically myself.As for total automation, I dont believe any of the current service ngferiofs come close to my definition of this. Single admins could run a lot in physical environments as well (I've done 200-500 machines by myself a number of times over the years), but without needing to deal with the physical boxes and having decent provisioning made this easier for more single admins to do.However, the overall quality of the systems, in terms of performance and reliability compared to cost is down significantly, it is just covered up by it coming up faster. More failures, with faster recovery times due to not needing to set up physical replacement machines.IMO: SaaS/PaaS + Utility Computing (EC2-like) = Cloud Computing, for a good enough definition, not that definitions are the most important part.Anyone, I like where we are going, but we are in a low point at the moment, not a high point. It'll get better as APIs evolve into covering all the cases that are required, which they current miss in a number of areas.
