The technical rationale for moving to the cloud can often be summed up in two words—autoscaling and autohealing.
- Autoscaling: The idea of autoscaling is simple enough although the implementations can get quite involved—apps are deployed on compute, the amount of compute capacity increases or decreases depending on the level of incoming client requests. In a nutshell, all the public cloud providers have services that make autoscaling and autohealing easily available. Autoscaling, in particular, is a huge deal. Imagine a large Hadoop cluster, with say 1,000 nodes. Try scaling that; it probably is a matter of weeks or even months. You'd need to get and configure the machines, reshard the data and jump through a trillion ...
