Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing, + Website

Summary

Forecasting can work—in some industries better than others—at least until a black swan flies into town. However, rather than attempting to forecast, it’s easier to exploit the benefits of on-demand capacity. A true cloud—which among other things entails a service provider offering on-demand capacity to customers—thus can achieve real business value by minimizing the penalty cost due to the wrong capacity to zero.

Although the analysis in this chapter has been somewhat abstract, the business benefits are real. Using on-demand capacity—that is, elasticity—to meet unpredictable, accelerated growth is one of the main benefits of the cloud, found in examples literally from A to Z: Consider Facebook application company Animoto, which scaled from 50 instances to 3,500 instances in less than three days, on an exponential trajectory.11 Zynga grew from zero to 42 million users in 30 days with its Empires & Allies game by leveraging public cloud elasticity.12

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“Random Walks,” at http://complexmodels.com/Brownian.aspx, illustrates the evolution of systems driven by processes such as Brownian motion and random walks.