Shifting Sands: New Business and Usage Models
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is a pragmatic beginning to utility computing that has the potential of transforming how IT assets are used. With EC2 a number of new business models and shifts are emerging such as:
Software Rentals: Software as a Service (SaaS) now moves from renting entire business applications such as Salesforce.com and NetSuite to renting industrial strength software components. Companies like Oracle, SAP, BEA and IBM now offer SaaS but have to create their own enterprise-strength infrastructure for it and typically only offer entire packaged applications through this model. An external compute capacity provider like EC2 brings the same capability to all organizations, while grid-enabled SOA infrastructure and applications mean they can actually take advantage of it.
Of course, open source software fits this model particularly well. In EC2 beta, Amazon has provided public images of Apache and MySQL, indicating the direction of things to come.
Zero-Configuration Services: AMIs are pre-configured, pre-packaged templates that can be instantiated by a simple web service call. Software vendors can “ship” their products in the form of pre-configured images that will never require any sort of configuration and/or installation and it just works. With the ability to pass in configuration data to instances at launch time (Parameterized Launches), AMIs can be created more generic in nature and vendors can “ship” generic images and instantiate instances with “editions.” For example, an Oracle AMI can be packaged to spawn an “Oracle App Server with 8i DB” Instance or an “Oracle App Server with 10g DB” Instance.
Value-Add Services: Much like StrikeIron and Xignite provide Functions for Rent, a new breed of service providers will emerge that harness the scale of Amazon EC2 to provide and charge for general purpose and business specific Web services.
General purpose web services are independent of business process and can include operations such as time-stamp, sign, encrypt, validate, or archive a SOAP message. Business specific services are related to core business functions and may include operations such as calculating mortgage payments, sales commissions, or sales tax. Rentable business-specific operations may mature into manageable modules of complex business processes such as processing insurance claims, aggregated items catalogues or fulfilling customer orders. Amazon EC2 Images can be shared with other users, and this will enable users to reuse already existing AMIs (created by other users) that are completely pre-configured with installed software (say Oracle App Server with Oracle 10g DB and Ordering BPEL process)
IT Asset Marketplace: Amazon EC2 is ideal for building shareable and reusable services. For example, User 1 can share with User 2 an entire pre-packaged EC2 Linux image with configured applications. Imagine an “AMI Marketplace” where users could shop for Images and reuse and in fact even start working on somebody else’s unfinished work (AMI). The marketplace concept could be further extended to enabling corporations to sell their under utilized assets dynamically and buy required assets from sellers. IT asset trading exchanges could become a possibility although such exchanges would only follow heavy commoditization and liquidity of such services.
Outsourcing Testing: There will be a new twist in Quality Assurance and Testing, especially the outsourcing companies. Since Outsourcing companies can provision instances as “testboxes” and since they only pay for as much as they use, they now have the ability to bill their customers for infrastructure they used for a project and also relinquish the “testboxes” when the project is over. Not to mention, they can get as many test boxes as they need at their disposal for stress/load/functional testing.
