Figure 12.2 The key types of highly variable workloads that are a great fit for
consumption-based pricing
In the Growing Fast scenario, a particular service’s utilization is growing rapidly and a
traditional on-premises infrastructure may not be able to scale fast enough to keep up
with demand. Leveraging the “infinite” scale of the public cloud removes the danger of
not being able to keep up with demand.
With Unpredictable Bursting, there may be big bursts in utilization, but the exact
timing cannot be planned. With the On and Off scenario, services are needed at
certain times but completely turned off at other times. This could be in the form of
monthly batch processes that run for only 8 hours a month, or it could be used by a
company such as a tax return accounting service that runs for three months out of the
year.
Although the use of the public cloud is a no-brainer in these four cases, a public cloud
solution is also a good option for many other scenarios (some I hinted at in the
beginning of this section). Additionally, while these four scenarios are great for the
public cloud, some are also a good fit for hybrid solutions with a mix of on-premises
and public cloud services. Consider the various bursting scenarios like our pizza
example. The normal baseline could be handled on premises, but the bursts could be
expanded out to use public cloud capacity.
For startup organizations, there is a saying, “Fail fast.” This does not mean that the
goal of the startup is to fail; rather, if it is going to fail, it’s better to fail fast because
less money is wasted than would be in a long drawn-out failure. The public cloud is a
great option for startups because very little up-front capital expenditure is needed to
buy servers and datacenter space. Instead, the startup has just operating expenses,
paying for the amount of service it actually uses. This is why startups like services