What to look for from cloud computing providers
Depending on what you're looking for, there are a variety of providers, even of basic application or infrastructure services, but their prices and specific offerings vary. There's often disagreement over how to even calculate cloud-computing costs.
Amazon: Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), the best-known infrastructure service, prices its services per terabyte per month, decreasing the cost slightly as volume increases. Customers pick their own services, including OS, security levels, access controls and APIs, and pay by volume of usage.
Google: App Engine: Gmail is free for personal use and starts at about $50 per mailbox for corporate implementations with private domain names. Google's App Engine lets customers build virtual Java or Python Web applications on Google servers, and pay by the gigabyte when their capacity goes beyond the 500MB of free data and resources to serve five million page views per month.
Skytap Virtual Lab: The lesser-known Skytap provides a platform on which customers can run virtual machines and applications without building the virtual infrastructure themselves. Subscriptions start at $500 per month and increase with storage and data-transfer volumes.
VMware vSphere4: VMware, the market leader in virtualization technology, has moved into cloud technologies in a big way, for example, with vSphere 4 (For more background on vSphere, see CIO.com's recent analysis of it.) While some vendors, such as Google, disagree with VMware's emphasis on private clouds, VMware has recently enlisted powerful partners in its bid to help customers use a mix of private cloud and public cloud technologies.
Microsoft Azure: The hypervisor build into Windows Server 2008 competes directly with VMware's virtualization software, but Azure is Microsoft's real entry into the cloud. Still in beta, Azure provides database and platform services starting at $0.12 per hour for compute infrastructure; $0.15 per gigabyte for storage; and $0.10 per 10,000 transactions for storage. For SQL Azure, a cloud database, Microsoft is charging $9.99 for a Web Edition, which comprises up to a 1 gigabyte relational database; and $99.99 for a Business Edition, which holds up to a 10 gigabyte relational database. For .NET Services - a set of Web-based developer tools for building cloud-based applications - Microsoft is charging $0.15 per 100,000 message operations, including Service Bus messages and Access Control tokens.
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