Our pioneering cloud-compute friends at RightScale published some very interesting observations about Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) daily CPU launches. They estimate a daily load factor of 50,000 CPU launches. The real potential of cloud computing (and I mean “true” cloud computing…. not legacy data centers masquerading as a “cloud”) is the ability to harness this on-demand “horsepower” in a scale-up and scale-down manner, embedding operational and infrastructure efficiency throughout the software stack.
Traditional enterprise software was not created to take advantage of the cloud’s ability to scale horizontally on-demand “up and down.” To truly embrace cloud computing new software stacks are required to break with the past constraints of fixed CPU to process more work for less costs. It’s the smart way and the right way to manage enterprise IT needs.