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Why Auto-Scaling In the Cloud Is a Bad Idea

Posted by kdawson on from the nobody-expects-the-spanish-inquisition dept.

George Reese writes "It seems a lot of people are mistaking the very valuable benefit that cloud computing enables — dynamically scaling your infrastructure — with the potentially dangerous ability to scale your infrastructure automatically in real-time based on actual demand. An O'Reilly blog entry discusses why auto-scaling is not as cool a feature as you might think."

3 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. One of several anti-cloud arguments by mattbee · · Score: 2, Informative

    I did some rough cost comparisons for a high-traffic web site in my similarly cynical article a few weeks ago (disclaimer: I run a hosting company flogging unfashionable servers, and am not a cloud fan yet :) ).

    --
    Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
  2. Re:He assumes too much by Animats · · Score: 2, Informative

    Consider for example a rendering farm.

    Such as ResPower. They've been around for a while, from before the "grid" era (remember the "grid" era?). This is a good example of a service which successfully scales up the number of machines applied to your job based on available resources and load. Unlike a web service, though, ResPower normally runs fully loaded, and charges a daily rate with variable turnaround, rather charging for each render. (They do offer a metered service, but it's not that popular.)

    It's worth looking at ResPower because, unlike most of the "grid" or "cloud" services, they have an established customer base and make money.

  3. Re:Get Off My Lawn! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Properly used, automation is a good thing. Blindly relying on it will get you burned

    Which is *exactly* what TFA says.