Page 54 - 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

Parker says that the experience has convinced Cybernau-
tic to drop its current form of computing, renting servers
from a service provider, and to move his clients’ 200 Web sites
into the multitenant Rackspace cloud, where customers share
servers but always have enough capacity to go around.
“I don’t need to worry anymore about whether I need to

add another server. The cloud automatically scales to match
what I need,” Parker said.
Much of the excitement about the cloud reflects this un-
derstanding of its elastic nature, its ability to scale up and
down for nearly any kind of business. Building elasticity into
the corporate data center used to be handled by buying and
installing servers until you had more capacity than you actu-

ally needed—an expensive proposition. With the cloud, it’s
suddenly possible for a small company, like Cybernautic, to do
everything that a big company would do. Best of all, you pay
only for the resources that you use, as opposed to buying and
installing resources that you might use but that will sit idle
most of the time.
Amazon charges 8.5 cents an hour to run a Linux server
or 12 cents an hour for a Windows server; Rackspace charges
1.5 cents an hour per Linux server. Additional charges are in-

curred for load balancing, auto scaling, and so on. In general,
cloud prices are deemed to be as low as or lower than the
charges arising from the most economical corporate data cen-
ter operation. The economies of scale built into the cloud give
it an ability to adjust on the fly for end users who need it—
both large and small businesses—and an ability to maintain
low charges.

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