I'm a grandpa, and that means I'll be able to tell my grandchildren and hopefully their children about the days when websites would just crash when too many people went to them! Can you believe it? Like having your cell phone cut off without warning. How strange that must have been!It is pretty absurd if you think about it - the definition of success is system failure - but that's just the way it is with a non-elastic infrastructure. To borrow from cooking, it would be like a pressure cooker without a release valve - think of the experiments that must have gone awry in the early pressure cooker labs!
Well, the Web is exactly like that - without an "overflow valve" that draws on extra capacity when needed, how can we EVER get past the problem of website crashes? And forget about "peak provisioning", or having enough capacity on hand to meet peak loads - no matter what you imagine your "peak" to be, there is always more.
I refer somewhere in this blog, at least a couple times, to "eating your own dog food" and how CapCal is being used not only to test its own capacity but to autoscale on demand. To test this we will have to run some pretty big loads in different patterns to make sure we maintain sub second response times regardless of the load factor.
Sub second response times regardless of the load factor. It almost sounds like a Perpetual Motion Machine if you think about it - a way to minimize your hardware resources while maximizing your capacity and performance. To be crash-proof as well as small and nimble is the best of all worlds!
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