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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."
Without a hard-limit, some people run up big cell-phone bills. If you are forced to stop and plan and budget when you exceed resources, then you have better control over them. Cloud companies will likely not make metering very easy or cheap because they *want* you to get carried away.
Table-ized A.I.
THe author states that one reason he doesn't like autoscaling is because it can take a while to take effect. Thats bad technology, waiting for someone to come along and improve it.
He also says he doesnt like autoscaling even with limiters. Autoscaling with limiters makes sense to me, especially if the limits are things along the line of 'dont spend more than XXX over time Y'.
Finally, not using autoscaling because you might get DDoS'd is just stupid. You lose business/visitors. Thats worse than paying more to avoid being taken down, because your reputation gets hurt AS WELL AS losing you business.
He seems to be assuming that you only want to run a website on this service. I don't think hosting websites on this kind of service is a good idea at all. There are many other types of application you run on clould computing infrastructure, which makes much more sense, and negates almost all of his claims.
Consider for example a rendering farm. One day you may have two items to render. Another day 10 items. The next day 5 items. Should you really scale up and down manually each day, when you could just as easily just start the amount of servers you need based on how many jobs have been submitted for that day, and how large the jobs are?
There are many other examples. Websites are not the only thing you run on these services.
Posted by a Debian GNU/Linux user
Properly used, automation is a good thing. Blindly relying on it will get you burned, but to totally dismiss it out of hand is foolish.
First Rule of Automation: Automation applied to an efficient task increases it's efficiency; likewise, automation applied to an inefficient task will simply increase the problem until it's an all out clusterfuck.
Second Rule of Automation: Automation applied to an effective task will be effective; likewise, automation applied to an ineffective task will still be a pointless waste of time.
Or something like that. My eloquence appears to be -1 today.
Yeap, that's right. With over 7yrs of solid hosting industry experience, it's very easy to see.
Atleast Amazon's service is WAY overpriced for long term use. Sure if you need it just for few hours ever it's all good, but for 24/7 hosting it ain't, none of them.
It's cheaper to get regular servers, even from a very high quality provide than to use amazon's services.
Best of all: You can still use their service to autoscale up if you prepare right, and yet have low baseline cost.
If it's only filehosting service you need, the BW prices amazon offers are outrageous, take a bunch of cheapend shared accounts, and you'll get way better ROI, and still, for the most part, do not sacrifice any reliability at all. Cost: Greater setup time, depending upon on several contingency factors.
Case examples: you can get from bluehost, dreamhost etc. plenty of HDD & Bandwidth for few $ a month. Don't even try to run any regular website on it, they'll cut you off (CPU & Ram usage), but for filehosting, it's great bang for buck :)
Scared of reliability? Automatically edit DNS zone according to locations availability and have low(ish) TTL. Every added location increases reliability.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
If that is true then at least one of them isn't actually generating an MD5 hash.
I'm just guessing, but I bet you were also encoding the line ending characters. That would be encoded differently on Windows and UNIX, so you'd actually be hashing two strings that differed by at least one byte.
His argument basically boils down to "Auto-scaling is a bad idea because you might implement it badly and then it will do the wrong thing". Isn't that true of everything? The flip side, is that if you implement it well, then auto-scaling would be a great idea!
It's like saying that dynamically sized logical partitions are a bad idea, because you should just anticipate your needs in advance and use statically sized partitions. Or dynamically changing CPU clock frequencies are a bad idea, because you should just anticipate your CPU needs and set your clock frequency in advance. Or dynamically changing process counts that adapt to different multi-core/CPU availability factors are a bad idea... you get the picture.
The idea that some computational factor can be automatically dynamically adjusted isn't necessarily a bad idea, it's just the implementation that might be.
And in addition, if that capacity is needed on my current servers (which aren't all cloud-y), how long does it take to scale up? I have to order a new server, install an OS, configure it, install all the software I need, test it, carefully roll it out.
Can I do that in 10 minutes? Not a chance! If I did that in 10 hours it would be a miracle. 10 days is a lot closer to reality, for a true rush job.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I can summarize this article in one sentence:
"X is only useful for those who are too lazy to do Y."
It's been said about assembly language, high-level languages, garbage collection, plug-n-play, and practically any other technology you can name. It is not actually a valid criticism.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
When your revenues scale with the services rendered, it *does* make business sense to auto-scale. Auto-scaling is a technical solution, not a business one. Being Slashdotted isn't typically associated with more commercial activity, it's associated with "hit-and-run" visitors. The same with social networks. Does Twitter even have a business model? But wherever there's a business model where margins are relatively stable but activity rises and falls, auto-scaling makes you money rather than costing you severely. Like many things, it's a tool which should be used wisely, where not paying attention can leave you missing fingers.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo