The 2010 Cloud Capacity Surge
SOASTA has held a unique position in the cloud community, allowing us to watch its evolution over the years. As one of only a few enterprise cloud applications, on any given day we may be looking for up to 10,000 cloud servers to simulate millions of virtual consumers for performance testing some of the world’s leading consumer web sites. With this in mind, we have had to be incredibly aware of the supply side of cloud computing. With this in mind, I’m happy to report that 2010 has been a very good year for cloud capacity growth (availability of cloud servers), as well as the elastic APIs required to access them.
Perspective: in 2009 there were only a couple of cloud data centers that offered infrastructure as a service and they were only in the US. For a company that regularly needed a few hundred cloud servers Amazon AWS was the only real supplier for us back then. But our business continued to grow, and naturally, in late 2009, we were very concerned that cloud capacity might not be able to keep up with us…. and everyone else.
As we come to the end of 2010, I’m very happy to report that indeed it has. Thanks to the continued growth of Amazon and the emergence of major players, such as Microsoft Azure, IBM and Rackcloud, as well as several regional players, cloud capacity has taken off in 2010. With CloudTest we can now provision thousands of cloud servers from more than (20) locations around the world, all in a matter of minutes. Amazon AWS has (4) major cloud centers in place today with several new ones planned in 2011. Microsoft dramatically changed the landscape in 2010 by adding (6) major cloud data centers. And watch out for IBM in 2011 as they add up to (10) new cloud data centers. The growth in cloud capacity in 2010 has been startling, even to us that have been watching closely. It’s a clear barometer that cloud computing is primed for takeoff in the Enterprise in 2011.
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