Page 48 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

MANA GEMENT STRATEGIES F O R THE CL OUD R EV OL UTION

his albums, can be shunted off to the multitenant servers in the
cloud. Many cloud customers in addition to Sony Music share
those servers, keeping the costs for the music company low.
The cloud service that Taylor chose was Amazon Web Serv-
ices’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). In the future, Sony will
build each artist’s store in tandem, with an e-commerce site

and a related but separate information serving site in EC2.
When the e-commerce site starts to get overloaded, the latter
can expand to meet nearly any foreseeable traffic count,
thanks to the elasticity of the cloud.
As traffic at any artist’s Web site builds up to a point where
the site can’t handle more, new visitors get shunted over to the
read-only cloud site, where they can at least find information

and identify something that they want to buy. Under the Ama-
zon agreement, cloud servers will scale up to handle as many
as 3.5 to 5 million visitors per day, if the occasion ever arises
that they need to. In a big traffic spike, a visitor might not be
able to purchase an album immediately but will never go away
miffed at not being served at all.
The new architecture reflects a changing world where on-
line activities and social networking have taken on added im-
portance. Sony management wants Taylor to be ready for the

changes in customer behavior. In the past, there would have
been less opportunity for the news of a pop star’s death to
spread so fast or to result in such a spontaneous outpouring
of grief and comment at a well-known music site. If the need
arises again, Taylor is in a position to fire up 10 more servers
in the cloud as soon as traffic starts to build.

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