Why Auto-Scaling In the Cloud Is a Bad Idea

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."

Comments

One of several anti-cloud arguments

[mattbee]

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 :) ).

Re:He assumes too much

[Animats]

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.