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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.
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.