Analytics in the Cloud

I attended a webinar today sponsored by Amazon and Vertica called “Data Analytics in the Cloud“.  The Vertica portion was mostly a duplicate of a prior web cast, but the Amazon portion on the Cloud concept was very interesting.  The key points of the cloud concept as I see it are:

• Pay as you go model - you only pay for the disk space and processing you consume. No start-up costs, but you have to sign a contract. (They claimed the cost was 1/2 that of an in-house solution)
• Time to market - hours instead of weeks to turn up a terabyte sized system, including hardware, OS, and the Vertica column based database
• On-demand scalability - seamlessly scales to meet your demand
• Proven platform - hosted by Amazon on the same platform that hosts the Amazon.com site

I think the benefits of this approach are obvious, especially for a small but rapidly growing operation.  The infrastructure and software license costs alone would be prohibitive, and time to market is critical especially when launching a new idea.

The downsides include:

• Security concerns, especially for highly sensitive customer data
• Performance - both in terms of loading large amounts of data and in real-time queries
• Long-term cost - as with any usage based cost model, the upfront savings could be surpassed by subsequent usage fees

This entry was posted on 22. May 2008 at 16:33 and is filed under Technical Focus, Vendors. 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.