Mark Twomey’s StorageZilla blog is one of my favorites. Insightful, witty and often inspired.
In his latest entry, Zilla-man claims to have seen the soft white underbelly of Amazon’s EC2 and S3 cloud storage business.
Of course this was pretty interesting to me as I’m a prehistoric skeptic of cloud storage, although most of my opinions on the matter have circled around the reliability end of things.
What I never did say, but wondered in the darkness was how the economics of it were going to work. There aren’t all that many free lunches in this world and the hard knocks of storage don’t appear to lend themselves to infinite sweetness and light. Storage is just a gnarly technology and that means there is real cost incurred somewhere.
Zilla-man writes;
one wonders for how much longer Amazon will continue to happily
subsidize every user of their AWS offerings? Their capacity is as
finite as everyone else’s so eventually there will have to be another
big infrastructure spend cycle where Amazon have to decide if they’re
going to go deeper into the hole or not.
Zilla-man, in your honor, a link to the Kate Bush video “Cloudbusting”