Cloud Computing For Dummies®

Chapter 13. Understanding Massively Scaled Applications and Business Processes

In This Chapter

• Defining massively scaled applications and business process

• Exploring current massively scaled applications

• Delivering business processes in a massive way

You can gain cost efficiencies by provisioning capacity on demand from a cloud provider. Or you can increase the overall efficiency of your data center with a private cloud; see Chapter 9. Bearing all that in mind, cloud providers have a unique sweet spot based on their use of massively scaled applications. In this chapter, we describe how companies use massively scaled cloud applications to offer highly cost-effective business processes and services.

Note

What do we mean by massively scaled? Millions of users doing exactly the same thing. When you do that, you drastically reduce the cost per user.

Most businesses require their data centers to facilitate the operation of many different types of workloads — such as compute-intensive analytics, collaboration capabilities for employees, virtualized desktop management, or business services like billing. Your typical IT infrastructure needs to be flexible enough to support lots of change and you need to build in redundancy to make sure that each workload has the capacity it needs when necessary.

But just imagine building a large data center with only one or two transactions in mind. You can make decisions about software architecture, hardware, and communications that enable a very efficient data ...