It was actually Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr who coined the term "cloudbursting" to describe the ability for the Amazon Cloud to deliver capacity on demand. But I discovered this after coming up with the name CapCal CloudBurst for our tsunami-style load testing service, so please don't call me a copycat!
Had the CEO of J Crew been drinking the EC2 koolaid like I am they might have made millions on the Obama girls' choice of coatware instead of having their website take a dirt nap like that. I'm sure they made a lot as it is, but you know they lost out on untold numbers of "impulse buyers" who forgot all about it by the end of the day.
I'm rather tipsy on the EC2 koolaid myself and it makes me wonder what they are spiking it with. To me it seems like the only way to keep things like this from happening because when you come right down to it you can NEVER know in advance how your app will respond to huge traffic without testing it, and you can never know how big of a number "huge" is until you exceed your greatest expectations!
Both CloudBurst-style testing and EC2-style cloudbursting are necessary elements of any long term solution to the spectacular website crashes we see every day (and all the ones we don't see). And it's not really crashes that are such a major problem, but the precious time of countless people is being wasted every day by uncalibrated, untested and totally insufficient web capacity. There, I said it!
It seems to me that a Web Speedometer that tells you when extra capacity is needed could be a perfect trigger point for when cloudbursting and its opposite (cloudshrinking?) should occur . And CloudBurst is a Poster Child application of EC2 the way I see it.
Hey, it tastes good to me, wanna try some?
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