Can Cloud Computing Scale At Amazon And Elsewhere?


At the heart of the cloud computing debate is the assumption that the cloud can scale to significant heights. But can it?

Some customers say services, such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, are already bumping up against capacity limits – even at this early stage.

The three-year-old Internet-based service from Amazon allows customers to rent computers in the Amazon cloud, or data center, to install and run their applications.

Need more computer power? Pay for the extra CPU time by the hour. But some customers say it isn’t as easy as that. That’s because Amazon can’t install new equipment fast enough. The consequence is customers say they have difficulty getting the full number of machines they want, when they want them.

The customers asked not to be named for fear of endangering their relationship with Amazon.

But one entrepreneur said he asked for 1,000 additional servers and got only 500. Another recently requested an expansion of his compute farm by an additional 1,000 servers and couldn’t get the extra power.

The explanation appears to be that Amazon is unable to handle the spike in traffic that would occur if the new facilities were required simultaneously. In fact, the company appears to be working on a scheduling application that would allow it to better plan for spikes in customer needs.

The application would let customers schedule their workloads.

So will the cloud ultimately deliver the ease of use and flexibility advocate say it should? Only if it is big enough to replicate the in-house computers companies rely on to run their businesses.

That would make it one awfully large cloud.