Category: economics

On Nuances of Jevons Paradox in Cloud Computing

I am not a formally trained economist. I am a software engineer, and economics (and economics in IT in particular) is merely a hobby of mine. I have now seen many mentions of Jevons paradox in the context of cloud computing. Initially, when I first learned about it, it sounded...

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My Doubts About Idea Behind SpotCloud.com

This is part 5 of my series on pricing in the cloud. The moment a second provider joined Amazon Web Services in offering IaaS cloud computing service, people in the industry started talking about a cloud computing marketplace where providers would be able to list available resources and customers would...

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Basics of IaaS Spot Pricing

This is part 4 of my pricing in the cloud series. Exactly one year ago - on Monday, December 14, 2009 - Amazon Web Services launched spot pricing as a new feature of Amazon EC2. In a nutshell, spot pricing is a dynamic pricing scheme for EC2 instances. At each...

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Run on the Cloud

This is part 3 of my series on pricing in the cloud. Do you think IaaS cloud prices are due for another reduction or will they remain at current levels for now? Regardless of which answer you or I would give to this question, ours is just a guess -...

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Dealing with Noisy Neighbors in the Cloud

This is part 2 of my series dedicated to pricing in the cloud. As I mentioned in the past, pricing is one of the most important aspects of cloud computing offerings. Up until now, however, I have been talking about pricing only from perspective of selling the services. This post...

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Pricing in the Cloud

I started writing this post, but realized that it was going to be way too long. So I decided to split it into a series. Here goes part 1 of my series on Pricing in the Cloud. Happy Birthday, Amazon EC2! You are 4 years old now - I wonder...

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Activity Streams, Cross-Posting and Pareto Efficiency

I once logged in to LinkedIn to reply to an inMail, and on their front page noticed several tweets from people with whom I am both connected on LinkedIn and whom I follow on Twitter. These were the same tweets that I just read in Tweetdeck - and I ended...

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Incentives and Cloud Computing Interoperability

To succeed, cloud interoperability must drive down costs for cloud computing vendors, both established and aspiring. This is how interop has been achieved throughout the history - look at car industry, railroads (selecting rail gauge), etc. Or check out Wikipedia article on Standardization in general. Indeed, for something to be...

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Operations Alerts and Tragedy of The Commons

Today I would like to continue my never ending quest of finding parallels between IT and economics and social sciences. I will start with a preamble, but if you are already familiar with a concept of “operations alert” in context of IT, you can skip it. Preamble I have spent...

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Terminology Fun - IT vs Economics

What we in IT call a “bad state” (as in “application ended up in a bad state and needed to be restared”) in economics is called “bad equilibrium.” Here is more on General Equilibrium theory.

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