Web storefront

A famous use case for cloud services is to use it to run an online storefront. Website traffic in this scenario will be highly variable depending on the day of the week, whether it’s a holiday, the time of day, and other factors—almost every retail store in the USA experiences more than a 10x user workload during Thanksgiving week. The same goes for boxing day in the UK, Diwali in India, Single day in china, and almost every country has some shopping festival. This kind of scenario is ideally suited for a cloud deployment. In this case, we can set up resource auto-scaling that automatically scales up and down compute resources as needed. Additionally, we can set up policies that allow database storage to grow as needed.

Apache Spark and Hadoop workloads

The popularity of Apache Spark and Hadoop continues to increase. Many Spark clusters don’t necessarily need to run consistently. They perform heavy batch computing for a period and then can be idle until the next batch of input data comes in. A specific example would be a cluster that runs every night for 3 or 4 hours and only during the working week.In this instance, you need decoupled compute and data storage where you can shutdown resources that may be best managed on a schedule rather than by using demand thresholds. Or, we could set up triggers that automatically shut down resources once the batch jobs are completed. AWS provides that flexibility where you can store your data in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and spin-up Amazon Elastic Map-reduce cluster (EMR) to run spark jobs and shut them down after storing results back in decoupled Amazon S3. You will learn more about these services in upcoming chapters.

Employee workspace

In an on-premise setting, you provide a high configuration desktop/laptop to your development team and pay for 24 hours, including weekends. However, they are using one-fourth of capacity considering eight hrs. workday. Cloud provides workspaces accessible by low configuration laptop, and you can schedule them to stop during off-hours and weekends, saving almost 70% of the cost.Another common use case in technology is file and object storage. Some storage services may grow organically and consistently. The traffic patterns can also be consistent. This may be one example where using an on-premises architecture may make sense economically. In this case, the usage pattern is consistent and predictable.Elasticity is by no means the only reason that the cloud is growing in leaps and bounds. The ability to easily enable world-class security for even the simplest applications is another reason why the cloud is becoming pervasive. Let’s understand this at a deeper level.