Re:Like cellphones (Score 2, Interesting)

As a cloud computing provider, I actually have no interest in having my customers suddenly run up huge bills. The reason is that as the article said, something is most likely wrong somewhere, which means that as their services provider, I'll also be responsible for figuring it out :) I can't speak for Amazon, which has a more hands-off model, but my success is invested in the success of my customers, so I won't sit idly by while they waste their money. However, looking at my company's balance sheet, we make our money off of base load, not peaks. Unlike what one of the other posters said, we can't average the peak load across customers since most customers have peaks at the same time, so accommodating peak load is more of a money-losing proposition since the bulk of those servers lie idle much of the day. In a truly round-the-clock (geographically distributed) cloud operation, this might be true, but even Amazon, which makes you choose the continent you want to run your cloud servers in, still has to hold a lot of reserve capacity (which is built into their rates) to accommodate the usual twice-daily peak loads. For web sites, a peak load that is many times the base load usually indicates something is wrong with the business model as well as the software, since SaaS providers also can't make any money off short bursts of usage. In many cases, peaks that last less than the provisioning time of a new instance (which is typically no less than a few minutes because of the time to load the instance's memory from storage) have to be handled differently anyway, either with more base allocation or for example with a queue of work to be done and notifications to customers when that work is completed.