Who Do You Trust To Meter The Cloud?So what has this subject got to do with Cloud Computing? |
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Tom Raftery at Greenmonk (the green shoot from
Redmonk) has a great analysis of the disastrous use of smart meters by PG&E in Bakersfield, California. He quotes SmartMeters.com that:
In the same story on smartmeters.com, State Senator Dean Florez, the Majority Leader in California, is quoted as saying “People think these meters are fraud meters. They feel they’re being defrauded. They’re getting no benefit from these things.” This after $2.2b (yes, billion) was spent on the project. Tom Raftery goes on to say: CIO, CTO & Developer Resources
There is a better way, however:
So what has this got to do with Cloud Computing? Quite a lot, actually. Customers of Cloud services right now depend on the "meters" being provided by the service providers themselves. Just like the PG&E customers in Bakersfield. This means that they depend on the service provider
itself to tell them about usage and pricing. There isn't an independent audit trail of usage. The meter also locks the customer into the service provider. A Cloud Service Broker addresses these issues. It is not a coincidence that much Cloud Service Broker terminology carries over from the world of utilities – it is solving the same problem:
The Cloud Service Broker analyzes traffic and provides reports as well as an audit trail. Reports include usage information in real-time, per hour, per day, and per service. Reports are based on messages and based on data. Visibility is key. This is all independent of an individual Cloud service provider. It is easy to imagine how useful this would be in conjunction with Amazon's spot pricing (see a great analysis of Amazon's spot pricing by James Urquhart here). The lesson from the Bakersfield debacle is that customers of services, whether utilities or Cloud services, need real-time visibility of their usage, real-time visibility of costs, as well as an independent audit trail. In the Cloud world, this is provided by a Cloud Service Broker. |
Posted via email from Ippei’s @CloudNewsCenter info database
This entry was posted on January 18, 2010 at 8:47 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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