Managing The Cloud

In this first in a two-part excerpt from the book, Babcock explains how SMBs can bring shape to and begin to rationally manage their resources in the cloud.

"Native Americans had no trouble believing that creatures from the spiritual world roamed at will among those of the physical. At night, these visitors became shape shifters, transforming themselves from the coyote, the bear, or the raven into a spirit form, then changing back again at daybreak.

Cloud computing is nothing if not similarly amorphous. The cloud's hard-edged, warehouse-sized data centers accessible on the Internet, filled with seven-foot-tall racks of pizza box servers, seem concrete enough. But when an individual end user accesses a server in the cloud, the server has the ability to take on or shed processing cycles from CPUs and use more memory or less, as needed. The user's cloud machine expands according to her needs and shrinks when peak processing is over. It may be on one side of the data center one moment and on the opposite the next. The end user hasn't slowed down what she's doing; the shift in servers occurs without her realizing it. In the cloud, the computer becomes a shape shifter. It's not limited by the box it arrived in; instead, it's elastic."