Cloud computing meets Moore's law

At present the public cloud market price war smoke again, Google will cloud servers, cloud storage and database services prices cut 32%, 68% and 82% respectively; Amazon responded, the average price of storage services down 51%,EC2 calculation Services reduced by 38%, large data Services price reduction of 27% to 61%; Microsoft Azure has also been quick to follow, with cloud service prices down 27% to 35% and storage prices down 44% to 65%. The price of a memory-intensive Linux instance is reduced by 35%, while the price of Windows instances is reduced by 27%. block log storage prices are also all down, which LRS price 65%,grs price 44%,azure price adjustment in most projects after the price of the same as AWS, some projects even cheaper than AWS.

Urz Horze, Urs Holzle, senior vice president of Google's Technology Foundation, said the product pricing scheme for cloud services should simulate hardware products and be "Moore's Law". But over the past five years, hardware costs have been slashed by 20% to 30% a year, while the cost of cloud services has been reduced by only 6% to 8% a year. "The pricing of cloud services is still too complex," Holzer said. Although the current charging scheme for cloud services is still relatively inexpensive compared to other alternatives, there is still a lot of room for price cuts. ”

Holzer said that Google will slash on-demand purchases, Pay-as-you-go and other related cloud services charges, range between 30% to 85%, of which Google's Big data Analysis Services BigQuery price reduction will reach 85%. By simplifying the process of buying cloud services, Google wants to attract more users to the company's cloud services. Google's current main rivals in the cloud computing market include Amazon, Microsoft, Rackspace and other innovative companies. Gartner, a market-research firm, predicts that the global cloud computing market last year reached $131 billion trillion. Amazon is one of the pioneers in the cloud computing services market. Market analysts expect Amazon's cloud computing service, the Amazon Web Services, to have revenues of more than 3 billion dollars a year.

Cloud services provider Rackspace is not involved in the price wars launched by Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Rackspace said that we would not adjust our price according to the rates the competitor offered in the original infrastructure. Rackspace in the past 15 years has been at a reasonable price to provide customers with the best quality service, professional technology, performance and reliability. Rackspace's public cloud business has gained 116 million dollars in revenue in the company's most recent quarter, compared with its traditional hosting business, which has a revenue of $291 million.

Rackspace is now in an awkward position, given the lack of breakthrough development trends in its traditional business, coupled with a gradual transition to a smaller but more strategic public cloud model of profit margins. In terms of server deployments, they are not enough to build economies of scale comparable to those of other large suppliers, but they are not as small as they are to ignore the price cuts of these tech giants.

Companies are trying to create a faster and more effective IT environment to ensure a more responsive, agile and successful business, according to IHS, a research institute. In these cloud-based deployments, companies also want to integrate the deep analytical capabilities of large data to gain a competitive edge through insights into existing and future customers. By 2017, businesses will spend more than $235 billion trillion on cloud infrastructure and services, up 35% from the expected 174 billion trillion dollars this year. Just last month, Cisco Zenno will spend more than 1 billion dollars in the cloud computing market to provide corporate customers with the same services as rivals. In the weeks before, IBM had just announced plans to spend the same amount of money on software and services-most of which would be spent on SoftLayer software, a service product.

The competitive landscape of global cloud services is emerging. Now, Amazon is undoubtedly cloud boss, and Microsoft, Google, IBM in many areas of fierce competition, each other. In 2013, Amazon's cloud services AWS accounted for more than 40% per cent of the global market for IaaS, and Microsoft Azure, the cloud service, which accounted for 64% of the global PAAs market; Salesforce provides a cloud service that occupies 21% per cent of the global SaaS market.

From the point of view of the user's needs, cloud computing is just a homogeneous commodity, with the development of cloud computing and the addition of more players, price warfare will be an unavoidable trend; On the other hand, many cloud computing providers have had to participate in the price war in order to provide differentiated services. Of course, the most profitable price war will also be users, price wars force providers to find a better quality of service, and the price of cloud servers will be more pro-people, but also to allow more users to join the cloud, so that the cake becomes bigger.