Pay as You Go in The Cloud

Hey everybody, Joseph Palumbo here with the Rackspace Cloud and today I want to talk to you about one of the more popular features of the cloud and that is our pay-as-you-go pricing or utility billing. Now, this ensures that you’re going to have all the resources prepared for all of your visitors without any waste or excess. Now rather than jump directly into dollars and cents, an analogy I like to use when I talk to customers about this is hosting a dinner party. And, in my opinion, you really need just two things to have a successful dinner party, and that is of course dinner. So let’s just go ahead and put “food” and if you’re like me and don’t really like to eat standing up because you’re always spilling it, you need somewhere to sit, so let’s go ahead and say “chairs.” So, in the first scenario, you’re going to host this dinner party at your home, which means that you’re going to need to make some decisions about how much food to buy and how many seats to have available. So let’s say for example, this chart represents the appetite of all of your guests. And let’s say this represents how much food you actually bought. Any of this white space in between represents waste. And any time the bar goes above that line it represents customers, or in this case guests, which are going to go hungry. And of course, what you really want to do is that you really want to do is that you want to nail it just like that, with just the right amount of food so that you don’t have a bunch of leftovers. And kind of the same thing with seating as well. If we extend this out and say, for example, you have very courteous guests, which always RSVP, then you should know exactly how many chairs that you’re going to need. But, as you know, sometimes you have folks that might bring a friend and in that case you’re actually not going to have enough chairs to accommodate all of your guests. So, that’s scenario one, hosting this in your house which is very analogous to say dedicated hosting. But let’s move this to a scenario, which is more analogous to cloud hosting, which is going to be more like a restaurant. See a restaurant has a kitchen and extra table and extra chairs, which can be deployed to your party at a moments notice. So in this example, if you have guests that show up with varying appetites, instead of just having one static line across, they can order exactly what they want, in a quantity that they want, in order to satisfy their appetite. The same thing with chairs as well. If you have not all your guests show up, or some folks bring some extra guests, once again, the cloud has excess resources, which can be deployed at a moments notice to make sure that all of your guests have some place to sit. So what this mean is, when you design and deploy your application, if you plan appropriately up front, you can make sure that you always have the resources that you need for the proper performance without ever having to spend anything on excess resources that you never needed to begin with. I hope that this was helpful, I hope you have a great dinner party, and I will see you on the Internet!