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Efficiently planning and expanding the capacities of a cloud
Cloud Nine
Planning used to be a tedious business for data center operators, taking some time from the initial ideas from customers to the point at which the servers were in the rack and productive. Today this time span is drastically shortened, thanks to the cloud.
The cloud provider must control the infrastructure in the data center to the extent that the platform can expand easily and quickly (i.e., hyperscalability), without major upheavals and its associated costs. Even before installing the first server, you would do well to think about various scalability factors, taking into account the way in which customers will want to use the cloud resources and your ability to enable capacity expansion effectively and prudently.
Although the question of how the available capacity in the data center can be used as efficiently as possible is important, another critical question is how cloud admins collect and interpret metric data from their platform to identify the need for additional resources at an early stage.
In this article, I examine the ingredients for efficient capacity planning in the cloud and explain how they can be implemented best in everyday life. The appropriate hardware makes horizontal scalability easy, and the correct software allows metering and automation.
Farsighted Action
Cloud environments reduce administrative overhead to such an extent that the operator can and must provide within seconds what formerly involved weeks of lead time. The cloud provider must promise its customers that they will have access to virtually unlimited resources, which in turn means a huge amount of effort – both operationally and financially. This scenario only works if the provider has a certain buffer of reserve hardware at the data center. However, providers cannot know what resources which customer will want to use in their setup and when. The question of how cloud capacities can be
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