I got a kick out of an eWeek article covering the recent fourth annual Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, which took place last week in Santa Clara, Calif. I mean specifically the comments by Jonathan Bryce, CTO and founder of Rackspace's cloud service, "who likened cloud computing to an elastic waistband."
Not to pick on Bryce, but perhaps speaking at a conference is not the best thing to do when it was just revealed that the Rackspace cloud suffered its third outage since June. While not making the big-time press like Gmail and Twitter downtimes, Rackspace is a cloud-based infrastructure provider that maintains a good deal of mission-critical public cloud computing resources.
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But back to the "elastic waistband."
"With the cloud, it's not just scaling up or out, but it's also scaling back down. Before clouds, you always had to buy more infrastructure than you needed; you could never buy just the right amount. That's what elasticity in waistbands and in the cloud is all about the right fit," Bryce said.
That's a very apt example when considering that many of us are breaking out the stretchy pants for Thanksgiving. However, we could be overselling that benefit. Follow me here.
Elasticity, which is what Bryce is referring to, allows cloud computing users to consume more or fewer computing resources as needed, on demand. Moreover, the use of these resources is relative to cost. The more you use, the more you pay; the less you use, the less you pay.
Thus, elasticity allows our computing needs -- let's call this our gut -- to expand and have the cloud computing resources expand along with it: Bryce's "elastic waistband." There's no need for waves of software and hardware installations and configuration to support the increasing computing power required. The same value occurs the other way around: the ability to use fewer computing resources as your needs decrease and, thus, pay less.
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