Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing, + Website

Inappropriate Cloud Use Cases

Many people love chocolate, but that doesn’t mean that it’s appropriate as a sole source of nutrition. There is much promise and value in the cloud, but that doesn’t mean it’s appropriate for all applications. Knowing what belongs in the “public” cloud and what doesn’t can help you develop a plan to transform your own architecture.

Constant

The cloud is renowned for scalability and for its ability to handle variable and unpredictable workloads; both on-demand resource allocation and pay-per-use pricing generate real economic value. However, in the unlikely situation that demand is flat and predictable, a perfectly viable strategy can be to bring the application in house. As we stated earlier, traditionally Zynga migrated games from the public cloud to its own data centers (the internal zCloud) once demand for a new game was stable and predictable. As the company’s aggregate volume has ramped up across many highly popular games, Zynga has benefited from the law of large numbers, experiencing an increasing proportion of workloads that offer constancy, and thus brought much of the processing for that constant baseline back in house.

Generally, most demand is not inherently flat, although it can have a greater or lesser component that is flat and it can often be shaped through incentives and disincentives, or be smoothed through aggregation with other unrelated demand, or have gaps filled in with deferrable work, such as backups.

Just because an app has ...