Ask YC: Is Amazon Eating Sun's Lunch?

1 pointjrsims1 comment

Seriously. I haven't heard so much as a peep out of the startup world regarding Sun's grid computing services (network.com). Back when Jonathan Schwartz was launching the thing in 2004, it sounded promising.

Crap, it's been 4 years already? Is anyone using Sun? Or is EC2 (still in beta, mind you!) eating Sun's lunch?

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Sun Grid and EC2 are quite different. Sun Grid is for batch jobs, which I think is inherently less visible, less flexible, and less cool than the Web 2.0 serving that people use EC2 for. Even if people were using Sun Grid you might never know about it. AFAIK Sun Grid is 5X the price of EC2, so even for batch jobs I don't know why anyone would use it.

Coincidentally, The Register just posted a story about a Sun project that could be quite competitive with EC2: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/15/caroline_sun_amazon/ (I have to wonder if this was a submarine job timed to coincide with the S3 outage.)

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