People love to quibble over cloud computing definitions, so let’s lay this one out: This article’s about infrastructure as a service, where companies rent virtual servers as needed for a variety of uses. Here, we’re digging into gritty practicalities not often discussed, including pricing and contract rules.
Amazon.com’s Elastic Compute Cloud service is the best known example, but the market now bristles with competition. To help companies understand this emerging market, we gathered detailed data from 12 infrastructure-as-a-service providers on prices, services, contracts, platforms supported, and more. A complete report of these findings, including four pages of comparison data on the offerings, can bedownloaded free.
We can draw some conclusions from that data and from what we’re hearing from customers. Hosting Web sites and testing software are the most common uses today, but public cloud services will be used more and more for variable workloads such as research or for peak e-commerce demands.
Continues @ http://www.informationweek.com
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