Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing, + Website

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Without the cloud, speed kills. Specifically, attempting to speed things up kills your IT budget. If an application takes too long on one server, you could buy 1,000 more and speed it up significantly. The good news is that you have just sped things up by three orders of magnitude. The bad news is that you had to spend 1,000 times as much to achieve this acceleration. Exhibit 17.3 illustrates that, without the cloud, the diminishing returns from increasing parallelization are not accompanied by diminishing costs but rather linear costs as more and more processors are added.

EXHIBIT 17.3 Without Cloud: Diminishing Returns from Parallelization with Linear Costs

With the cloud, something beautiful happens, as shown in Exhibit 17.4. Your acceleration is free: Regardless of the number of processors, the cost remains constant.

EXHIBIT 17.4 With Cloud: Constant Costs Regardless of Parallelization

Getting something for nothing is quite surprising and important. To understand this principle, consider a wedding with 100 couples, at least traditionally one held before the baby/nursery portion of our scenario. We need to get these couples from the ceremony to the reception. We could have one cab drive back and forth. If the reception is only 3 minutes from the ceremony, it takes ...