Comments on: The cloud’s most important equation

By: Why elasticity, performance, and analytics will change how Webops is judged | Bitcurrent

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 21:16:57 +0000

[...] elastic computing. Which entails getting billed per capacity used. We’ve covered this in an earlier post on Bitcurrent, but it seemed the Velocity audience was the perfect place to bring it [...]

By: James

James — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:47:46 +0000

You might want to clarify that you’re only talking about speed and defining it as user experience within a very narrow context. I’d have to say that, while response time for a server is certainly important to some user perceptions, it’s but one small piece of the overall user experience.

By: Izzy

Izzy — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 11:14:04 +0000

Alistair, when cloud vendor only provides the basic network infrastructure, CPU and storage, you are still left with options to improve performance (end user experience). For example, cloud doesn’t have to provide application delivery controller (fancy load balancer) as user can deploy its own into the cloud just as easy as any other application they are deploying. At the end it is another piece of software. (Except legacy application delivery controllers that are still hardware based and anchor customers down in the past.)

By: random_graph

random_graph — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:37:33 +0000

I was very confused to read “experience=traffic/capacity”. It should read either 1) “latency=traffic/capacity” or 2) “user experience=capacity /traffic”. Everyone I know defines high user experience as “good” and low user experience as “bad”.

It would be interesting to learn what these cloud services have in the way of “benevolent degradation”: Would you rather deliver horrible service to a few users or fractionally (imperceptibly?) degrade service to all users? There are always instances of server/router/datacenter loss and how the system behaves when capacity approaches traffic level.

By: Interesting Links for November 12th — dougmcclure.net

Interesting Links for November 12th — dougmcclure.net — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 10:09:56 +0000

[...] The cloud’s most important equation – If you build a traditional data center platform for your application, you worry about three variables: The amount of traffic to your site, your capacity to handle that traffic, and the user experience they get, such as latency. The equation looks like this: [...]

By: tross

tross — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 20:37:05 +0000

Alistaire,
You may remember a company called Ejasent back in those days. They were the first I remember to use the term elastic computing – certainly predating our use of the term. Although we didn’t come up with the cool phrase, we were definitely among the first to use service level objectives as a means to control compute resource allocations.

p.s. are you still in touch with Dan Koffler? He was a great guy to work with back in the early days of Think.