Amazon Web Services revises support plans, cuts prices
Amazon has revised its support pricing for Amazon Web Services, expanding basic free support and lowering the cost of premium support.
The company has also added a number of support features, including alerts and the ability to interact with support personnel through chat.
Launched in 2006, AWS has been widely used by organizations and users looking to outsource their computer infrastructure by tapping into IaaS (infrastructure as a service) offerings. It provides computing nodes, databases, storage, load balancing and other services, all available on pay-as-you-go pricing plans. Read more...
Cut the contract: How prepaid smartphones can save you money
Smartphones may make our lives easier, but boy, they sure do make our wallets lighter. A typical smartphone setup with one of the major U.S. carriers costs around $70 to $80 a month -- and that's on the lower end of the spectrum. So what if there were a way you could get the same kind of service for less than half the cost?
It turns out there is -- if you're willing to make a few trade-offs. The secret lies in a rapidly growing but rarely discussed segment of the smartphone market known as prepaid or contract-free service. Prepaid service has been around for some time, but in the last couple of years it's started to transform from a source of cheap, bottom-of-the-barrel phones into a viable outlet for compelling smartphones.
So what exactly do you give up by going the prepaid route and is the sacrifice worth the gain? Read on; you might just be surprised. Read more...
It’s not the coding that’s hard, it’s the people
The data about software development is sobering. Many projects end up over budget and over schedule, and one study puts the failure rate at one-in-five.
The path to better projects may be for software developers to become better people. A recent conference on agile development had new-age sounding sessions on such topics as "An Introduction to Non-Violent Communication for Agile Coaches," "Fear Driven Impediments" and "Collaborating with Non-Collaborators."
The stakes involved in getting software projects right can be huge. Development projects costing millions of dollars can become such a mess that businesses turn to people such as Billie Blair, an organizational psychologist and president and CEO of consulting firm Change Strategists Inc., to untangle the disorganization.
In nearly every case, Blair said the source of all project dysfunction is the project manager.
"Anything that goes awry in a company," said Blair, "can always be traced back to the manager." Read more...
How cloud computing is changing data center design and cost
If you've read this blog for a while, it's no secret that I believe that one aspect of cloud computing is a dramatic drop in the cost of computing. While many discuss cloud computing's cost advantage in terms of better utilization via resource pooling and rapid elasticity, we believe that there is a more fundamental shift going on as data centers are redesigned to focus on scale, efficiency, and a shift to commodity components.
Put another way, the former cost advantage (utilization, etc.) relies on more efficient use of existing data center design patterns, while the latter relies on transforming the cost basis of data centers by creating new design patterns.
I wrote about this topic a few months ago in a post entitled "Are you making your data centers cloud-friendly?" In it I discussed trends evinced at the San Francisco DatacenterDynamics conference: energy efficiency, raised operating temperatures, and "chicken coop" data center building designs. Read more...