Slashdot Mirror
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."
I think auto-scaling the clouds based on actual demand is a really great idea. I think farmers would really like that feature, in fact.
Wait, what clouds?!
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 blogosphere has disagreed with the use of web2.0 in the cloud. Sure, we all know that data is king and that's why we use software as a service nowadays with the web as a platform using AJAX and RSS extensively. This has helped to solve the challenge of findability since lightweight companies helps to connect user needs. The fact is that the long tail is part of the paradigm of user as co-developers in server wiki-like sites. Unfortunately this brings up the problem of ownership of user generated content. But I think that perpetual betas help the architecture of participation to stimulate web2.0. Interaction does make the experience good.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Someone get this guy a cane to shake at the whipper-snappers. "In my day, you learned proper capacity planning or you didn't enter the data center!"
It can take up to 10 minutes for your EC2 instances to launch. That's 10 minutes between when your cloud infrastructure management tool detects the need for extra capacity and the time when that capacity is actually available. That's 10 minutes of impaired performance for your customers (or perhaps even 10 minutes of downtime).
Like, you could do it so much faster than 10 minutes without auto-scaling. Bah! If you've read The Art of Capacity Planning you would've mailed in the coupon for the free crystal ball and seen this coming!
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.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.