Few days back I posted an article on Top 10 Cloud Computing Service Providers of 2009. Many readers asked what is Cloud Computing? Why there’s so much buzz about Cloud Computing in the tech-industry? Why it’s definition so fuzzy?
I believe, we understand better with examples & scenarios or case study sort of explanation. I’ve picked the best real-time scenarios from my experience of past few years to describe the basic of Cloud Computing. Let us demystify it.
August 2008, United States of America
“At the end of August [2008], as Hurricane Gustav threatened the coast of Texas, the Obama campaign called the Red Cross to say it would be routing donations to it via the Red Cross home page. Get your servers ready—our guys can be pretty nuts, Team Obama said. Sure, sure, whatever, the Red Cross responded. We’ve been through 9/11, Katrina, we can handle it. The surge of Obama dollars crashed the Red Cross website in less than 15 minutes.
—Newsweek
May 2009, India
The world’s largest democracy, 1 billion+ population, goes to the jumbo general election. The election commission unveiled a brand new website for providing real time results of the mega-poll. It showed off arrangements which was well prepared to handle 80.64 billions hits in 8 hours (2,800 hits/second). Obviously a decent number by any standard.
Guess what happened?
On the election result day media reported:
“300,000 hits/second make Election Commission website crash”
This per second hit rate means 8.64 trillion hits in 8 hours. Is it less than Google’s hit/second? Take a guess.
Similar server crashes were reported across India during the online CAT examination conducted by prestigious IIMs (Indian Institute of Management) in November/December 2009, though they were smartly attributed to virus & not to the number of hits.
June 2009, China
“A Chinese website set up so people can inform on corrupt officials has been inundated with so many visitors that it crashed shortly after launching”
---BBC
Perhaps it made you smile, may be equally worried as well, the level of corruption! No need to worry, cause this also signifies a huge number of proactive citizens willing to report it. Look at the bright side.
October 2009, France
A website launched by French first lady Carla Bruni has crashed on its first day - overwhelmed by the number of users trying to access it at once.
---BBC
Online mob. Wish I was even half as popular as her!
What inference can we draw from above server crashes/failures?
The discussed incidences of server crashes are a few among the 100s happening almost everywhere in the world on a regular basis. What does this indicate? Just one conclusion and that is:
Currently, only 25% of world population, i.e. approx 1.75 billion people have Internet access. Compared to Television and other mass media it’s still considered an elite medium of communication. If this meager Internet penetration has lead to significant number of crashes, what will happen when the Internet becomes a mass medium? India & China has approx. 15% or less Internet penetration. Even a moderate increase in Internet penetration & usage, say to 50% will add more than a billion Internet users! Definitely, too many clicks to handle. Going by statistics & backed up by almost double digit GDP growths they are soon going to add this number.
What’s the solution to prevent above scenarios
Most of you will answer:
- Add more number of servers to balance the load (load-balancing)
Will it solve the problem or compound the problems of companies/organizations that are already on a tight budget?
Moreover, How many servers do you think will be enough to handle that kind of traffic? Take a guess. 100? 1000? …
Before you guess, Let me provide you some facts to help you make a wise guess.
- Facebook uses 30,000 servers! (till October, 2009) and it’s adding capacity on a daily basis. Sounds weird.
- An unofficial estimate predicts number of Google servers to be an incredible 1 million in it’s world wide data centers!
The websites discussed are not as big as Facebook or Google but their spike in traffic on that particular day may had beaten these giants! Given these kind of stats, the organizations/entities involved in our above scenario/case study will fork out enough money to make them eligible to file bankruptcy protection.
Even if they are financially sound enough to add these huge number of servers, Just remember the following from our above scenarios/case study:
- Red Cross will get this exponential surge in number of hits once in a decade or may be we don’t know when (i.e. only when there is a natural calamity of bigger scale)
- Indian election commission website will attract visitors only when there’s an election. i.e. ideally once in 5 yrs (Forget regional election, they don’t attract much traffic).
- Chinese corruption website traffic would have gradually reduced to a normal level in a month or so.
- Carla Bruni’s fans would have mobbed her website only for a week or so.
The above description clearly shows following trend:
Most of the traffic spikes are predictable and can be planned for. Even Red Cross traffic surge was also predictable, but you’ve got less time to react & plan for it. So adding 1000s of servers to handle a few days or seasonal spikes in traffic is a humongous waste of resources. Also, think in terms of business, it goes through lean season & it goes through peak season. In a real world scenario it’s very difficult to predict when your business will need how many servers/resources.
So, what do you think is the best solution?
Stay tuned to Pulse of Technology for the 2nd part of this article on Cloud Computing Basic introduction, we’ll analyze further & find the best solution.
Cloud Computing Articles at Pulse of Technology
9 comments:
Looking forward to read the part 2.
A very informative post! I knew a bit about cloud computing, but its not complete..... this may help me to complete my knowledge about cloud computing! :D
Very impressive article!
Good one buddy. I'm not very techie so this info is new to me. 30K of servers on FB? Wew, that's a crazy number ;-)
eagerly waiting for part 2.. and interesting thing is Google has 1 million servers.. OMG
Cloud computing is still new to me and hope to see your part 2 soon. Thanks
First time I reading about cloud computing. Thanks I will search it on goggle for more news
Cloud computing is really taking off in the US. I've been working with Microsoft to deliver existing applications as SaaS solutions. These give enterprises a low cost, low risk opportunity to begin using services almost immediately.
very interesting and upcoming tech
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