Spot Instances, Big Clusters, & the Cloud at Work

Perspectives (Sep 20 2011) Cloud Computing

1. If you read this blog in the past, you’ll know I view cloud computing as a game changer (Private Clouds are not the Future) and spot instances as a particularly powerful innovation within cloud computing. Over the years, I’ve enumerated many of the advantages of cloud computing over private infrastructure deployments. A particularly powerful cloud computing advantage is driven by noting that when combining a large number of non-correlated workloads, the overall infrastructure utilization is far higher for most workload combinations.  This is partly because the reserve capacity to ensure that all workloads are able to support peak workload demands is a tiny fraction of what is required to provide reserve surge capacity for each job individually.   This factor alone is a huge gain but an even bigger gain can be found by noting that all workloads are cyclic and go through sinusoidal capacity peaks and troughs. Some ... (Read Full Article)

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