Architecting for Scale, 2nd Edition

Chapter 17. Cloud Resource Allocation

As you build a highly scaled application, one important step for deploying the application is allocating the resources necessary to operate the application. Resources can be anything from computer instances to data storage. How you allocate those resources, and how you determine what the allocation should be, matters to your application. If you allocate too few resources to an application, you can starve the application and create an availability problem. If you allocate too many resources, you can waste money by having too many resources lying around idle and unused.

This is the struggle with all highly scaled applications, and it is especially a problem for highly spiky application usage. If your application has relatively short periods of time with extremely high usage, and significantly lower usage at other times, deciding how to allocate resources efficiently can be a problem.

This is one of the key advantages of the cloud. With the cloud, you can dynamically allocate resources on an as-needed basis in order to handle these spiky needs efficiently, without leaving a significant amount of unused resources lying around during nonbusy times.

But managing cloud resources is not a simple task and takes care and consideration. Successfully managing your cloud resource allocation needs without creating waste or starvation requires knowledge of how resource allocation works in the cloud. You must understand how cloud resources are allocated, ...