Cloud Computing Is Moving So Fast, Traditional Management Process and Tools Will be Under Pressure.

This morning I got my Amazon EC2 newsletter outlining all the changes they are introducing this month. 

Three things struck me about the changes. 

1) The speed at which improvement and new offerings are coming to market. It's really going to put pressure on all MSP's but also in-house cloud users. It's not just a matter of matching the offers, but having to match and beat them every month.  This requires a deep bench of product marketing expertise and process.

2) Continued downward pricing of instances.Which means more pressure on margins for MSP's. This is going to require more financial savvy  than we usually see in IT departments.

3) The IT storefront will need to be dynamic and fast moving.  The changes Amazon introduces require a continuous evolution of the service catalog and console interfaces.  I think this is going to strain TCO for companies trying to build their own portal with traditional tools ("What? I can't order 16G of Ram because it takes 3 months to change the form?" or "I can't do reserved instances until the end of the year?") At some point the rate of change is such that

This is something we have worked on a lot with our cloud service catalog--our traditional customers make lots of changes to the catalog, continually updating and improving it.  This is possible by the non-programmatic nature of our ServiceDesigner tools  ("New offer, change this here, voila! ready to go.") 

For example, we introduced dynamic pricing in our last release. This allows a cloud product manager to set different prices depending on the options chosen. For example, "Select cloudwatch" as an option, varies your hourly pricing. Now mind you, a web page designer could do that. The trick is to maintain that day in day out against a dynamic market environment.