Dancing in the Cloud

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brian Butte.

In the early 2000’s when the IT world was in the throes of ERP, CRM, SFA and ecommerce, IT infrastructure was invariably designed to support the absolute worst-case scenario. I quickly learned there were two options when launching any self-serve solution: it either flat-lines or takes off like a rocket—there is no in-between.

The capacity planning challenge drove the development of grid computing, then virtualization, and finally cloud computing. Although with cloud we now have a way to rapidly scale up to meet increasing demand, it seems we have forgotten scaling down to conserve resources is equally important. Instead of provisioning “just in case” our worst fears came true, I find repeated examples where cloud is provisioned “just because.”…

When people think about cloud they often think cheap. Cheap storage. Cheap compute. Cheap applications. In traditional IT, once a server is purchased and installed, it’s run rate is largely ignored. In a cloud world, though—particularly in public cloud—the meter is ticking each and every moment the resource is allocated whether value is being delivered or not…

Read more from the source @ http://www.networkworld.com/article/3074018/cloud-computing/attacking-overconsumption-of-cloud-services.html