Comments on: Animoto is no infrastructure flexibility benchmark

By: William Vambenepe’s blog » Blog Archive » Grid cloudification

William Vambenepe’s blog » Blog Archive » Grid cloudification — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 07:55:21 +0000

[...] 1,000 and 4,000 mostly Intel cores” -> According to this well-publicized story, Amazon can deliver 5,000 servers (each linked to at least one physical core) to one customer [...]

By: What’s my motivation? « Identity Blogger

What’s my motivation? « Identity Blogger — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 11:49:37 +0000

[...] 2008 · No Comments William Vambenepe has some keen observations about requirements here in this post about Cloud [...]

By: botchagalupe

botchagalupe — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:22:07 +0000

Best exemplified by the attitude of Tarus (from OpenNMS) in the latest Redmonk podcast (paraphrased): sure we’ll customize OpenNMS for cloud environments; as soon as someone pays us to do it.

This, IMHO, is why he sitting on the sidelines of the “Little 4″/”Mighty Two” lists…

By: botchagalupe

botchagalupe — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:18:26 +0000

The key to the Animoto story is that they had 25k customers and because of the change they made to their Facebook interface they had 700k wanting to use their service and become customers. That type of growth with out a utility/cloud designed infrastructure would not have happened for years. This was completely different from being slahsdotted. Based on the deisgn of thier business model they needed to add thousands of servers in that week to support the creation of animoto video’s. I would have to think that Animoto would not have spun up twice as many just for people wanting to browse thier site (i.e., slahdotted). No matter what way you spin it supporting an infrastructure that allows your business to grow 700k new customers in a week is a good thing (benchmark or no-benchmark).

IMHO, customers that expect huge success will design their business model to accept this kind of dynamic growth. Of course a smart business will weight the cost and benefit of when to throttle. In fact SmugMug has a good example of how they first started putting everything on a queue and then found sometimes the queue was to large to process (economically). They now have monitors that throttle queues (based on what I have read).

As for calling it a cloud, I agree, that term is killing all of us. However, unless you use that term you can’t speak a common language.

my .2 cents.
John