Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing, + Website

CHAPTER 24

Cloud Patterns

A variety of cloud patterns—architectures and usage scenarios—have economic characteristics well beyond trading off unit costs and pricing strategies or balancing distribution against consolidation. We looked at some of these use cases in Chapter 7. Here we analyze some in more depth, touching on abstract characteristics that translate directly into business benefits. For example, hub-and-spoke networks require fewer physical connections than fully connected point-to-point networks and benefit from statistical multiplexing. However, these benefits come at the expense of longer average distance and thus latency, hub investments, and potential congestion.

Patterns such as markets, i.e., buyers connected to sellers, offer not only connection savings, as in a hub-and-spoke network, but the potential to get a better price or find a more perfect match. Here the benefit depends on the distribution and dispersion of values among buyers or sellers. If most prospects are buyers and there is limited price dispersion, it only takes a few buyers to get close to a best price.

This chapter illustrates that cloud-native applications can be evaluated using a variety of mechanisms well beyond the cases considered earlier.