seemed like it took 5 hours for 2 minutes of action, then a 5-minute commercial
break, and then a different set of players coming out and moving the ball a couple
of yards. It would be hard to get me to watch it again, but nonetheless, it’s popular
in the United States.
As Americans watch the Super Bowl, they like to eat pizza, and the Super Bowl
represents a perfect storm for pizza-ordering peaks. During the Super Bowl,
people throughout the entire United States—across all four time zones—are in
sync and ordering at the same times, during breaks between the first and second
quarters, at halftime, and between the third and fourth quarters. These three
spikes require 50 percent more compute power to handle the ordering and
processing than a typical Friday dinner time, which is the high point for pizza
ordering.
Normally systems have to be built to handle the busiest time, so our pizza
company would have to provision a capacity of 50 percent more than would ever
be needed just for that one day. Remember also that it’s 50 percent more than is
needed for dinner time on Friday, which itself is much more than is needed any
other time of the week. This would be a hugely expensive and wasteful exercise.
Instead, Microsoft Azure is used.
During normal times, there could be 10 web instances and 10 application
instances handling the website and processing. On Friday between 2 p.m. and
midnight, this increases to 20 instances of each role, and then on Super Bowl
Sunday between 12 p.m. and 5 p.m., this increases to 30 instances of each role.
I’m making up the numbers of instances, but the key here is that the additional
instances exist only when needed, and therefore the customer is charged extra
only when additional resources are needed and not at other times. This elasticity
is key to public cloud services.
To be clear, I totally understand the eating pizza part!The pizza scenario is a case of Predictable Bursting, which is a known period of
increased utilization and one of the scenarios that is perfect for cloud computing.
Figure 12.2 shows the four main scenarios in which cloud computing is clearly the
right choice. Many other scenarios work great in the cloud as well, but these four are
uniquely suited because there are periods of utilization, and with the public cloud, you
pay only for what you use.