Capping IT Off

With IBM, Amazon and Microsoft fighting for our cloud computing attention, we might forget to think about useful scenarios for all this fancy airy stuff. We all know the classical e-commerce example with its season-bound resource spikes and the occasional raw processing/render power we need, but this week I stumbled upon something new: cloud bursting. Before I get into that, let’s first take a little step back. A recent blog post by James Urquhart (now helping Cisco in cloud computing strategy) lets us wonder whether a cloud computing strategy is always cheaper than having your own data center. As you might have guessed: no. The main idea is that applications that are always running on 100 % are often hosted cheaper in your own data center than paying for the elasticity of a cloud (which you actually don’t use). So, applications that do need the elasticity (e.g. the e-commerce and render farm we talked about earlier) can benefit financially from the cloud. One other strategy that I didn’t think of earlier (stupid me) was pointed out on Scobleizer’s post of his visit to the Cisco data center: cloud bursting. Simply said: run everything in your own data center and once you detect heavy usage, offload it to the cloud! Example he gives is 12seconds.tv that offloads a movie to Amazon’s S3 file storage when they detect high view rates. Can we think of any useful applications in the enterprise space? Oh yes: update / file servers (it only gets busy when you release a new product or service pack), payroll processing (only once a month, but do you want this in the cloud?), … Any other suggestions?