Abstract
Provided certain obstacles are overcome, we believe Cloud Computing
has the potential to transform a large part of the IT industry, making
software even more attractive as a service and shaping the way IT
hardware is designed and purchased. Developers with innovative ideas
for new interactive Internet services no longer require the large
capital outlays in hardware to deploy their service or the human
expense to operate it. They need not be concerned about over-provisioning
for a service whose popularity does not meet their predictions, thus
wasting costly resources, or under-provisioning for one that becomes
wildly popular, thus missing potential customers and revenue. Moreover,
companies with large batch-oriented tasks can get their results as
quickly as their programs can scale, since using 1000 servers for
one hour costs no more than using one server for 1000 hours. This
elasticity of resources, without paying a premium for large scale,
is unprecedented in the history of IT. The economies of scale of
very large-scale datacenters combined with ``pay-as-you-go'' resource
usage has heralded the rise of Cloud Computing. It is now attractive
to deploy an innovative new Internet service on a third party's Internet
Datacenter rather than your own infrastructure, and to gracefully
scale its resources as it grows or declines in popularity and revenue.
Expanding and shrinking daily in response to normal diurnal patterns
could lower costs even further. Cloud Computing transfers the risks
of over-provisioning or under-provisioning to the Cloud Computing
provider, who mitigates that risk by statistical multiplexing over
a much larger set of users and who offers relatively low prices due
better utilization and from the economy of purchasing at a larger
scale. We define terms, present an economic model that quantifies
the key buy vs. pay-as-you-go decision, offer a spectrum to classify
Cloud Computing providers, and give our view of the top 10 obstacles
and opportunities to the growth of Cloud Computing.
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