Cloud Computing: Wasting Resources, Redefined

One of the most interesting things we encounter when my consulting company works with clients is their reaction to the infrastructure architectures of cloud providers. When we explain that they achieve robustness by keeping multiple copies of data on commodity hardware, rather than the traditional model of investing in expensive hardware to improve device robustness, we observe a visceral shudder in people.

When we go on to explain that designing applications for cloud environments requires architectures with built-in redundancy because one assumes the underlying resources may fail, we can see a second shudder. What, keep computing resources running at low load just to ensure application uptime? That’s … wasteful.

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