Utility Computing

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Ultimate goal is to provide shared compute and storage resources

• Instead of going to a hardware committee to provision balkanized resources, a project allocates a part of its budget for use on Yahoo!'s shared grids
• Pay as you go
  • Only buy 100 computers for 15 minutes of compute time vs. 100 computers 24x7

Allen Wittenauer , Deploying Grid Services Using Hadoop 2008

Utility computing is the big game changer ¹ and Cloud Computing On Demand is the how.

See Also

• Deploying Grid Services Using Hadoop
• Hadoop Twenty Four Seven

A Question Of Scale

As the number of nodes increases:

• Providing that failures are random ² , failure rates tend towards a tight normal distribution
• The proportional contribution of each node decreases, limiting the impact of a failure
• The cost of conventional chatty clustering protocols ³ increases

So, failures change from being unexpected, unusual high impact events into predictable low impact ones that application must manage gracefully as part of their normal operations.