> I would point out that the cost to provide z/OS services, or any computing > services for that matter, is greater than zero, especially but not only for > "real production business work." If you'd like to suggest that any company > price its set of products and associated services below cost, it wouldn't > shock me if that company disagrees with your suggestion.
Starting at $0, doesn't mean that it stays at $0. And it may be largely marketing hyperbole, but it certainly catches your attention. But actually AWS offers a free tier for many of their services and you can in fact use them for whatever you want. The free tiers are limited in some way. For disk/CPU/memory this is a relatively small configuration free for 12 months. Granted, you aren't going to get real heavy lifting done on the free tier, but the point is you have something to try and play with. Other services just give you the first x operations for free and only starts charging after that. For example, Amazon SNS gives you 1 million publishes free per month. AWS Lambda gives you 1 million free requests per month and 400,000 GB-seconds of compute time per month. I have no idea how much useful work this really equates to but it's non-zero. The real point here is that services like AWS give new businesses an easy on ramp with costs that scale pretty linearly from $0 in small, easily digested increments. Those pennies certainly add up to real significant dollars in the long run, but once you've built your architecture & infrastructure, you're less inclined make a radical change to something else. A reasonable question might be how does an organization transition something that started in Linux in AWS to z/OS? Where is the point where that makes sense? Who would even know to consider that? What is the real entry cost and TCA for z/OS versus other options? What can be done in AWS that can't be done in z/OS easily, and vice-versa? These are all questions that hopefully IBM product/platform planners are seriously considering. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
