Page 51 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

THE AMORPHOUS CL OUD

A common case where CloudWatch, Auto Scaling, and
Elastic Load Balancing might be useful is when a business is
hosting a Web site and doesn’t know how much traffic to ex-
pect. If the site goes from a few hundred hits an hour to tens
of thousands or hundreds of thousands, the site owner can load
balance by calling up additional EC2 servers itself, or employ

an EC2 management service, such as RightScale, to monitor
the situation and perform the task for it. This elasticity comes at
a reasonable price; CloudWatch with Auto Scaling results in a
charge of 1.5 cents per hour for each EC2 server used.
Other cloud providers offer a similar elasticity of service.
Chad Parker, the CEO of Cybernautic, a Web site design firm
in Normal, Illinois, was given the task of building a Web site

for the Sunday evening hit TV show Extreme Makeover: Home
Edition. The show was coming to nearby Philo, Illinois, and he
knew that he needed more server resources than usual behind
the project.
Extreme Makeover travels to a new location each week and
shows a home that has been refurbished for a local family with
the help of a local builder, friends and neighbors, and hun-
dreds of volunteers, onlookers, and other casual participants.
By the time a show airs on a given Sunday evening, several

thousand people have had some part in its production, or
know someone who has. Parker knew that he had a lot of un-
predictable traffic headed his way.
He had a week to get a site up and running that could show
text, pictures, and video and be updated frequently. In addi-
tion, the multimedia-heavy site would experience severe spikes

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