Enterprise Web 2.0 Fundamentals

CHAPTER 8. Cloud Computing

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Let me start with a story about the infrastructure of Internet retail sales. You see, the sales are very seasonal—a good majority of the sales happen between Thanksgiving and Christmas. And any delay in processing during that time is lost sales (and word gets around, which then reduces the customers coming to the site), so companies have to provision for the peak sales period and make sure that not even a single sales transaction is delayed because of performance. This is fine and good, but what happens to all the extra capacity that is sitting idle during the rest of the year? Well, one company in the Pacific ...