Cloud & Web Properties

Apr 25, 2010 Posted on Apr 25, 2010 in Cloud Fit, Cloud Platforms, Strategy | 2 comments

Web properties jumped the cloud bandwagon early and seem to be the ones that are riding it the most. What makes the cloud an interesting paradigm for them? This article explores the main reasons why it makes so much sense for scalable web properties ( which includes web applications as well as web sites ) to adopt cloud computing.

Cyclical businesses

An online shopping site knows the travails of the tide and its turn. On Christmas Eve, such a website could receive two million hits. And before they can relax, New Year brings another three million. And then there is a pause when visitor count comes down to a trickle. But can that business dismantle its three-hundred-server infrastructure by the second week of January? Or is there Valentine’s Day to watch out for? Does that mean you have to spend on the hardware and twiddle thumbs between peak traffic periods?
For starters, it takes a non trivial time to get infrastructure ready for deployment by leasing the servers. And, you pay for this on a monthly basis. March through October is this business’ lean time. That means wages for full-time employees looking after the hardware & an IT team that develops and maintains applications. Cloud computing can provide elegant solutions.

As a corollary to the above, think of yourself as an advertiser during Super Bowl. You flash your web site address watched by millions on TV, and are confident of a million hits over 48 hours, compared to the average daily of a few hundreds. You don’t want to invest capital on equipment to support folks visiting your site for those two days! Hop onto the cloud and hop off when you are done.

Smooth delivery of content

If what you offer on your site is rich content delivery, that is another good reason to consider an offering from the cloud. Assume that traffic to your site is pretty high (again, thanks to the ad during Super Bowl) and streaming your content requires pretty good bandwidth: you certainly wouldn’t want your visitors waiting to be done, before they make way for others in queue. So, folks logging on from Beijing would be served up content from a location, in the cloud obviously, in Singapore while those logging in from Nairobi would get the same from a server in Johannesburg. This constitutes what is commonly called the Content Delivery Network. Both Microsoft Azure and Amazon have CDN offerings on their cloud platforms that are much more cost effective to their traditional counterparts from the likes of Akamai.

And, imagine what this could do to the costs of complying with your board’s disaster recovery plan? If you have mission-critical applications running, a distributed network helps you keep one end up even if another goes down. Earthquakes or Volcanic ash, God forbid, in one part of the world? Worry not – another part of the world lights up! And, at costs incomparable to those you would spend if you set up sites all on your own across the globe.