IBM on Amazon EC2 – Adobe listen up
On the way into work this morning I was thinking about a blog post I’m working on suggesting some ideas on how to utilise and more importantly Adobe could license ColdFusion in the cloud and what should arrive in my inbox was an email from Amazon announcing that
We are excited to announce that IBM and Amazon Web Services have teamed up to provide you with the ability to build and run a range of IBM applications using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) service. This relationship will enable you to bring your own IBM licenses to Amazon EC2, utilize IBM’s "Development" AMIs, or leverage the "Production" Amazon EC2 running IBM service. The initial list of IBM environments that will be available includes: IBM DB2, IBM Informix, WebSphere sMash, IBM Lotus Web Content Management, and IBM WebSphere Portal Server.
Now this stole my thunder – as this was one on my propositions that Adobe should consider for ColdFusion. What if Adobe were to follow suit and team up with Amazon to Amazon offer prebuilt, licensed ColdFusion AMIs that we pay for what we use giving us the ability to spin up new instances and not have to worry if I’ve got enough licenses to cover it.
Interestingly, IBM license based on the number of virtual cores, this applies to all IBM software so the same licensing model can be used in the data centre and in a virtual (cloud) world – this is where ColdFusion differs as it’s per physical CPU, maybe it’s time to change to per core licensing or at least introduce a per core license (priced correctly of course) and this is the license model required for ‘cloud computing’. I never liked the idea of per core licensing but now with the shift to a more virtual world then it seems like the only option. With the IBM model you may already have you own licenses and there will be a way to bring your existing licenses with you, so I imagine they will have different pricing if you want to ‘pay per use’ their licenses or use your existing licenses.
NOTE: It seems then whenever we’re talking about ColdFusion in the cloud we always end up talking about EC2 – I’m aware there are other offerings coming to the market but at the moment EC2 does seem to be the flavour of the month.
No related posts.
Adobe is already doing something similar for other applications – see
http://www.redmonk.com/cote/2009/01/13/livecycle-in-ec2/
I agree that the most notable part of the IBM announcement was not that you can now use IBM products on the Amazon EC2 Cloud (which most people would know was feasible anyway) but that you can bring your existing IBM licenses with you to Cloud-based deployments of the software.
I’m hoping that the LiveCycle in EC2 is the start of offerings from Adobe but I’m not sure that the Live Cycle EC2 is intended for production use – more development rather than having to install and set it up yourself.