Yesterday, AWS announced new pricing for SimpleDB and its noteworthy: free developer usage for 6 months. No charge for up to 1GB of ingres+egress, 25 machine hours, and 1GB storage.

To help you get started with Amazon SimpleDB, we are providing a free usage tier for at least the next six months. Each month, there is no charge for the first 25 machine hours, 1 GB of data transfer (in and out), and 1 GB of storage that you use. Standard pricing will apply beyond these usage levels, and free usage does not accumulate over time.

In addition, beginning today, Amazon SimpleDB customers will now enjoy significantly reduced storage pricing, only $0.25 per gigabyte-month. This new rate reflects an 83% reduction in storage pricing. For more information, see aws.amazon.com/simpledb.

From: Amazon SimpleDB now in Unlimited Beta.

I’ve been arguing for several years that the utility computing pricing model and the ability to near instantly grow or shrink, make the move to the cloud inevitable. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and numerous startups are all producing interesting offerings and all are moving quickly. Enterprises normally move slowly to new technologies but when the price advantage is close to 10x, enterprise decision makers can and will move more quickly. The weak economy provides yet a stronger push. It won’t happen at once and it won’t happen instantly but I’m convinced that in 7 years, the vast majority of enterprises will be using utility computing for some part of their enterprise IT infrastructure.

It reminds me of a decade and a half ago when nearly all enterprise ERP software was home grown. The price advantage of SAP, Baan, Peoplesoft, etc. was so great at the time that the impossibly difficult and slow move from home grown, internally written ERP software to packaged apps happened nearly overnight by enterprise standards. We see the same pricing advantage again with utility computing.

–jrh

Thanks to Jeff Currier for sending this one my way yesterday.

James Hamilton, Data Center Fues
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