A reason to care about the cloud: your credit card is now a supercomputer.“Cloud Computing” like most trending topics has been over-hyped and over-sold by non-doers who want to lock you into “Software As a Service” ransom-ware. But there is a reason to think about and respect the true trend of cloud computing. Your credit card is now a supercomputer. An Amazon.com small Elastic Map Reduce node costs $0.1 per hour to rent. Sure, they round up the hour; but that comes to around $875 per cpu-year. Or closer to hand- my last set of map-reduce experiments on 10 machines (including failures and re-doing) cost about $3.58. Think about that next time somebody is hogging the corporate cluster or demands a detailed ROI justification before you get near “the big iron.”
Categories: Opinion
jmount
Data Scientist and trainer at Win Vector LLC. One of the authors of Practical Data Science with R.
Bit of a goof on my part- I had initially quoted only the additional price for running Elastic Map Reduct on top of an EC2 instance (not the full price, now fixed).