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The beauty of pay as you go cloud services is that you pay for what you use. If you only use a small amount, you only pay a small amount. My S3 bill each month rarely goes over $5, because I only use it in small amounts. Amazon charges my credit card and sends me an email with the details. But for most companies doing lots of credit card transactions for small amounts simply isn’t worth it. The fees associated with credit card transactions add up fast when dealing with such small transactions. At least for most companies.

Amazon has been doing large volumes of credit card transactions for a number of years, I’d be very surprised if they don’t have some custom fee structure for processing them. When you do the volume of transactions that a company like Amazon does, that gives you a little more leverage. So part of what has allowed Amazon to grow into the pay as go cloud services market is the fact that they already had a large payment system in place that allows them to process even fairly small transactions efficiently.

This gives Google Checkout an even more important role than just being a competitor to PayPal. With AdWords and AdSense already going, Google already has plenty of reason to want the same sort of leverage Amazon has for processing payments. With Google App Engine expected to have a similar pay as go structure as AWS, there will be even more focus on processing small amounts without taking a big hit on fees.

Now back to Sun. As far as I know Sun has nothing that even comes close to Amazon’s volume of transactions or Google’s small fee services. So they’ve had no reason to build up an efficient payment system that can handle small amounts. This leaves them with two choices, build one to try and gain the needed leverage to reduce the fees involved, or partner with someone else who already has. So far they’ve gone with the later, specifically Amazon and their EC2 service.

One way around the small transaction amount problem is to have customers pay in advance. Sun could still offer pay as you go services, but you have pay for them upfront in $100 increments. Each month your usage fee would be deducted from the amount you already paid them. If I only used $10 this month, I’d still have $90 left in my account. This isn’t nearly as attractive from the small customer side as simply paying $10 per month from their credit card, but not horrendous either, especially if you could get the minimum pay in advance amount down to something under $50.

I’d really like to see more competition in the cloud services space, but so far Amazon has it pretty much all to itself (which a small niche potentially going to Google App Engine). And unless companies like Sun can find ways to process small payments efficiently we might not be seeing any for a long time to come.

I don’t know why, but the ending still makes me laugh :-)

WordPress.com has passed 3 million blogs. Here are the current sign up rates, any guesses for when we’ll hit 4 million?

What service should Sun offer to the world? I’ll give you a hint, they recently spent $1 billion dollars acquiring the company behind the product. Yep, none other than MySQL.

Love it or hate it, MySQL is widely used by many companies and individuals. What I’d like to see from Sun is a MySQL cloud service that works just like your current MySQL server(s), only better. It should scale such that I don’t have to worry about performance and replicate data sufficiently that I’ll always have access to my data. There’s no need for a new API, since MySQL already supports network connectivity.

With MySQL already in such wide spread use, the benefits would be easy to see. For instance, I could use such a service to power my WordPress blog with only a few changes to my wp-config.php file. Effectively requiring zero code changes.

Pricing wise I’d expect something similar to EC2 or S3, a general pay as you go schedule. Perhaps even with a very low use free option, just enough for people to get hooked. But if I were Jonathan Schwartz I wouldn’t stop there.

As nice as it is to have an easy to use pay as you go web service, there are many companies that would like the performance, scalability and reliability of such a service but don’t want to send all their data to Sun. Enter Sun’s Modular Datacenter, a.k.a. data center in a box. Okay, a very big box, but a box none the less. Take all the lessons they learn making the MySQL cloud service work and put them in the data center box and sell it.

This would also appeal to hosting companies, who could then offer the same sort of service to the users. Imagine some place like The Planet having a few of these in their data centers. They’d get the benefits of the cloud service without having to haul all that traffic over their Internet connections.

In my ideal world this wouldn’t be limited to MySQL. I’d love to see this same sort of thing for PostgreSQL, since Sun has also been pushing PostgreSQL for Solaris as well. Sadly I’m not holding my breath on that one. With PostgreSQL being a much more community based project, there’s nothing to stop some other company from providing this service.

Perhaps Sun should have changed their stock ticker to MYSQ instead of JAVA.

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I’ve shared a document with you called “Spam sharing test”:
http://docs.google.com/a/example.com/Doc?id=xxxxxxxxxxxxxx&invite=

It’s not an attachment — it’s stored online at Google Docs. To open this document, just click the link above.
—

Shared this doc with you.

Which is a really handy way to collaborate with others on a document. And it seems the spammers have discovered this as well.

I’ve recently started seeing emails for documents that I’ve been invited to, which turn out to be just a bunch of spam. They’ve taken Google Docs and are using it in an attempt to mask their spam from email filters, by providing link to a service you might normally trust. I suspect that Gmail is unlikely to mark any doc invites as spam.

Currently this seems to be pretty limited, the spammers have to paste in the email addresses into an invite box. Google could do some basic things to prevent spammy looking invites from going out (do you really mean to invite 3.78 million people to share your document?). I’m not aware of a Google Docs API that allows you to script doc invites, but if there is one (or if they come out with one later) then you can bet the spammers will make use of that as well.

This will turn into another wack-a-mole situation, where Google will (hopefully) revoke accounts and API keys for users who are sending out spam in this way. Then the spammer will just start using another one of the 324,834 accounts that they’ve already created at Google until it gets blocked too. Rinse, lather and repeat.