Chapter 5
Chapter 5
Chapter 5
99.9 percent uptime. On its own financial reports, Zynga IBM, Cisco, and other traditional data center giants
recognized that a significant majority of its game traffic realize that cloud computing is a threat to their technology
had been hosted by a single ven-dor and any failure or infrastructure business. As a solution to rising computing
significant interruption in its network could negatively costs, they have been steering their customers toward
impact operations. Amazon Web Services had an outage virtualization software, which allows them to run many
for several hours in April 2011 that made it impossible more applications on each individual server that they buy.
for users to log into some of Zynga’s games. There are also many companies that simply have too much
legacy technology to use the cloud effectively. For
However, owning data centers also comes with risks. If example, Credit Suisse has 7,000 software applications
the demand for Zynga’s games were to drop dramatically, running on its systems that have been developed over the
Zynga would have too much IT infrastructure on its hands past 20 years. Ensuring that all of these applications would
and losses could result. The most likely scenario has Zynga work the same way in the cloud would be more trouble
owning part of its data centers and relying on external than it’s worth.
services such as Amazon for the rest.
Many other companies share Zynga’s con-cern about
Not all companies use cloud computing in the same cloud reliability and security, and this remains a major
way that Zynga does, but many do. Outback Steakhouse barrier to widespread cloud adop-tion. Amazon’s cloud
wasn’t sure how popular an upcoming coupon experienced significant out-ages in April and August 2011
promotion would be, so the company used Microsoft’s and again on June 14 and 29, 2012. Normally, cloud
Azure cloud to launch the promotion. Outback ended up networks are very reliable, often more so than private
selling an unexpectedly large 670,000 coupons. Using networks operated by individual companies. But when a
the cloud, it was able to avoid taxing in-house systems cloud of significant size like Amazon’s goes down, it
unnecessarily. sends ripples across the entire Web.
InterContinental Hotels has revamped its
infrastructure to include both private and public cloud According to Amazon, a simple network configuration
usage. To improve response time for custom-ers, error caused a major multiday service outage in Amazon’s
InterContinental moved its core room reserva-tion East Coast region from April 21–24, 2011. Amazingly,
transaction system onto a private cloud within its own the error was most likely a simple error made by a human
data center, but it moved room availability and pricing being during a routine network adjustment. Sites affected
Web site applications onto public cloud data centers on included Reddit, Foursquare, Engine Yard, HootSuite,
the East and West coasts. In fact, InterContinental hopes Quora, Zynga, and many more. On June 14 and June 29,
to put all of its publicly accessible information in these 2012, AWS suffered outages due to power failures in its
public clouds so that customers receive faster results to primary East Coast data center in North Virginia. Many
site queries. Customers receive data faster if the data are popular Web sites, including Netflix, Heroku, Quora, and
located on a server that is physically close to them, and Pinterest, as well as Web sites of smaller companies, were
cloud computing helps InterContinental to take advantage knocked offline for hours.
of this.
The outages were proof that the vision of a cloud with
Start-up companies and smaller companies are finding 100 percent uptime is still far from reality. Experts have
that they no longer need to build a data center. With cloud conflicting opinions of how serious this is. A June 2012
infrastructures like Amazon’s readily available, they have report issued by the Paris-based International Working
access to technical capability that was formerly only Group on Cloud Computing Resiliency estimated that the
available to much larger businesses. For example, online major cloud comput-ing services were down about 10
crafts market-place Etsy uses Amazon computers to hours per year or more, with average availability at 99.9
analyze data from the 1 billion monthly views of its Web percent or less. Even this small amount of downtime can
site. Etsy can then use its findings to create product recom- lead to large revenue losses for firms that need 24/7
mendation systems that allow customers to rank which availability. Nevertheless, some large cloud users such as
products they like best and to generate a list of 100 Netflix believe that overall cloud service availability has
products they might enjoy. Etsy’s engineers and managers steadily improved. Neil Hunt, Netflix’s chief product
are excited about their ability to handle these types of officer, believes the cloud is becoming more reliable, and
issues on someone else’s computer systems. that AWS gives Netflix much larger scale and technical
expertise than it would have otherwise. A
Part Two Information Technology Infrastructure
number of experts recommend that companies for whom February 28, 2011; Ashlee Vance, “The Cloud: Battle of the Tech Titans.”
Bloomberg Businessweek (March 3, 2011); Peter Svensson; Steve Lohr,
an outage would be a major risk consider using another
“Amazon’s Trouble Raises Cloud Computing Doubts,” The New York
computing service as a backup. Times, April 22, 2011; Charles Babcock. “Post Mortem: When Amazon’s
Still, cloud computing has finally gone mainstream, Cloud Turned on Itself,” Information Week, April 29, 2011; Patrick
and the major cloud providers have the sales numbers to Thibodeau, “Amazon Cloud Outage Was Triggered by Configuration Error,
prove it. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and other cloud “Computerworld, April 29, 2011; and Charles Babcock, “Zynga’s Unusual
Cloud Strategy is Key To Success,” Information Week, July 1, 2011.
providers will have to continue to work to avoid outages,
while other companies must decide whether the cloud is
right for them, and if so, how to most effectively use the CASE STUDY QUESTIONS
cloud to enhance their businesses. What business benefits do cloud computing services
provide? What problems do they solve?
Sources: Charles Babcock, “How Game-Maker Zynga Became a Cloud What are the disadvantages of cloud computing?
Vendor,” Information Week, May 14, 2012; Charles Babcock, “Cloud’s How do the concepts of capacity planning, scalability,
Thorniest Question: Does It Pay Off?” Information Week, June 4, 2012;
and TCO apply to this case? Apply these concepts both
Zack Whittaker, “Amazon Explains Latest Cloud Outage: Blame the
Power,” ZDNet, June 18, 2012; Stuart J. Johnston, “Cloud Outage of 13 to Amazon and to subscribers of its services.
Providers Reveals Downtime Costs,” searchcloud-computing.com, June 22,
2012; Charles Babcock, “4 Companies Getting Real Results from Cloud What kinds of businesses are most likely to benefit from
Computing,” Information Week, January 15, 2011; Charles Babcock, using cloud computing? Why?
“Amazon Launches CloudFormation to Simplify App Development,”
Information Week,