Page 49 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

THE AMORPHOUS CL OUD

Such elasticity is one of the things that distinguish cloud
computing from large corporate data centers. Many data cen-
ters include a specially engineered elastic capacity reserved
for a select few users, such as major customers who are trying
to make purchases on a site that is already busy with browsing
visitors. In some cases, more servers are engaged to handle the

traffic. But it’s also possible for the information seekers to
experience delays or even get booted off the site until the buy-
ers have completed their transactions. In the cloud, however,
there’s no need to turn away desired traffic. Additional “vir-
tual machines” can be fired up quickly to handle all comers.

How to Build an Elastic Cloud Center

In the first chapter, I tried to move the debate away from how
large an Internet data center needs to be in order to be in-
cluded in the cloud, a topic that engineers can argue over, and
put the focus on the end users. Now let’s move the spotlight
in the opposite direction and try to show what the newly em-
powered end user can do with a data center that’s available in
the cloud.

As this is being written, Amazon.com itself is 15 years
old, but Amazon Web Services’ EC2 has been in operation
for just three years. As of October 2009, it passed its first-year
anniversary of operating as a generally available resource,
following two years of operation as a beta, or experimental,
facility.

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