Simple Scalability with the Cloud

The most common definitions of the term Cloud computing usually refer specifically to the advantages of scalability of IT resources over the Internet so I thought I would touch on it briefly here.

The beauty of course with new software is it will have been developed and optimised to run in the Cloud so scalability and related performance will not be an issue. However what must not be underestimated is that many organisations today will find that because they don’t have the expertise in-house to manage or cost out the idea of moving, they cannot properly project the savings and will hesitate in moving a legacy application to the cloud. Many traditional software providers will have developed a SaaS platform so make sure you explore this option if you are considering a move, rather than simply moving your existing solution to a hosted environment.

For small businesses the elasticity of the Cloud is ideal as they are likely to have a handful of employees that use some software only partly or occasionally, plus they may want to add or remove people frequently, so a cost per user SaaS subscription will allow them to manage this better with a lower net spend throughout the year. Similarly, but on a greater scale for larger businesses, this enables them the flexibility to quickly change their infrastructure needs allowing them to run applications to economically meet demand.

For example AWS have a feature called Auto Scaling which allows you to automatically adjust the number of servers added or removed depending on load to. Some good real world examples of this the fluctuating demand on ticket websites when new dates go on sale, when Netflix launch the new series of House of Cards. Music streaming platform Spotify is another good example of when scalability is of utmost importance. They add over 20,000 tracks a day to its service so quick development and deployment is key and a long lead times of the past are out of the question. It is perhaps unsurprising Spotify chose to go with Amazon as first mover AWS has, according to Gartner, more than 10 times the computing capacity in use than its next 14 largest competitors, those of which include Google and Microsoft.