By Todd Doerr
Whether or not you are on the cloud bandwagon, all of the talk about quickly scaling up (or down) computing resources based on demand is intriguing and attention worthy. This capability to meet fluctuating capacity demands, whether increasing or decreasing, is often referred to as elasticity by cloud providers.
Traditional capacity planning aims to optimize computing capacity by providing margin to accommodate future demands. Take for instance the following real world examples of demand that affect computing loads:
- Seasonal demand increasing for a retailer (an expected short-term ramp up and ramp down)
- New business or revenue opportunity with a trading partner creates new demand (a quick ramp up)
- Periods of business growth from promotions and campaigns, increases in sales volume, new product launches (periodic ramp up and ramp down)
All businesses and organizations should plan for these types of demand changes. Companies typically address capacity planning by purchasing extra servers, and either over or under estimate their current and future requirements. Many times companies build in a 20% to 30% or even larger margin, which can be unnecessarily costly. This was acceptable ten years ago with traditional capacity planning. However, considering the technologies and resources available today, this approach can be inefficient and potentially wasteful. The traditional approach, no matter how optimized, can leave your organization short on money or capacity – or with some excess, and obsolescing, capacity carried as a sunk cost.
Cloud providers are taking proactive approaches to directly address this issue, especially in the area of elasticity. Elasticity enables organizations to adapt to changing capacity demands by deploying (and releasing) necessary resources on demand. For instance, a retailer planning for the holiday season load can contract for their “base” load for most of the year, but can temporarily provision additional capacity for the busy months. This elasticity enables the organizations to avoid paying for excess capacity during the slower months.
By paying only for the capacity you actually need with flexible cloud-based services, your business can reduce unnecessary spending and maximize cost savings. Many companies are seeing that benefit as a compelling reason to review how much their extra computing capacity is really costing them.
