When Elasticity Is a Bad Thing

Elasticity is a highly-touted value of Cloud Computing

Oct. 22, 2009 11:46 AM

Elasticity is a highly-touted value of Cloud Computing. As demand goes up, you can provision new infrastructure to match it. You could even do this automatically. This is great, right?

Daryl Plummer of Gartner was one of the first people to point out the problems with this - when he blogged that "Cloud Elasticity could make you go broke" back in March.

More recently, the situation has become more worrying with the BitBucket DDoS incident against BitBucket's site hosted by Amazon Web Services. Hoff covers an interview with Peter DeSantis of Amazon, and (paraphrasing), says:

"The solution being proposed by DeSantis here is that a customer should be prepared to launch/scale multiple instances in response to a DoS/DDoS, in effect making it the customers’ problem instead of AWS detecting and squelching it in the first place?
http://www.rationalsurvivability.com/blog/?p=1456

Lori MacVittie, writing about the same issue, says that the issue is context - how can you distinguish between the legitimate traffic spikes (the Facebook farming app going viral, the wolf t-shirt sales spiking when it gets an ironic online following) and DDoS attacks such as that against BitBucket.

The answer points to more advanced analytics, which can make this context distinction. And, lo and behold, look at Number 1 and Number 2 on Gartner's "Technologies you can't afford to ignore" Top 10 list for 2010, covered by Joe McKendrick:

Clearly, these two need to work together: Cloud Computing and Advanced Analytics, for advanced analytics of Cloud Computing infrastructure. Though you could argue that analytics do not have to be particularly "advanced" to detect a gigantic DDoS attack which (as Lori MacVittie pointed out) was actually at the infrastructure level not at the application level [ in a similar vein, Hoff asks: "Why did it take 15 hours for AWS to recognize the DDoS in the first place? (They didn’t actually “detect” it, the customer did")].

More reasons for Cloud service providers to provide Value-Added Services which provide increased assurance and security for their customers.

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About Mark O'Neill
Mark O'Neill is Chief Technology Office of Vordel. Vordel connects applications to applications, businesses to other businesses, and SOA to the Cloud.

A regular speaker at industry conferences, Mark holds a degree in mathematics and psychology from Trinity College Dublin and graduate qualifications in neural network programming from Oxford University.