Cloud Computing Strategy: It's a Hotel, Not an Apartment

[Former Member]

If we were to compare cloud computing to a residence, it wouldn’t be an apartment, says Andrew Hillier, CTO of CiRBA. In a apartment you can have family meetings in the living room or drum practice on the balcony, living there indefinitely. But as Hillier points out in a ZDNet article, it’s more accurate to think of cloud computing as a hotel: “cloud applications move in, stay a while and then leave.”

Hillier makes the point that many business execs see cloud computing as a storage center for one kind of data over an extended period of time. The tools those business uses are dependent upon a large workload over a large time, which wastes the utility of cloud computing. Hillier suggests “that hotels are a better thought model for how today’s data centers are being used. Virtual workloads come in, stay a while and then leave. If resources aren’t reclaimed and used to support a different virtual workload, data center efficiency and overall data center performance suffer. Costs for systems, storage, and software would all be higher than really necessary.”

In other words, fitting system capacity by utilizing only available space is a better option than unnecessarily increasing system capacity in order to handle larger, longer workloads. The work gets done, then finishes and leaves in time for the next workload to come through and occupy the same cloud space.