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Seasonality is worth planning for, but the value of investing in plans for seasonality depends very much on how quickly you can react to changes in demand. Buil

Seasonality is worth planning for, but the value of investing in plans for seasonality depends very much on how quickly you can react to changes in demand. Building data centres has a long lead time and costs a lot of money, so spending a lot of money on forecasting demand is a worthy investment. On the other hand, a new container process might take a few seconds to load, so you can get away with more error. There's one caveat, though, where planning for seasonality becomes valuable again: competition for shared resources. Suppose you are using a cloud provider to provision VMs on demand. If you're caught short by a stockout, then fast reaction time now becomes a long reaction time. Setting an approximate or safe base level of capacity on a schedule increases the odds that you won't be caught dangerously short. (The Blizzard observations were interesting, thankyou).

hinkley 6y ago
> If you're caught short by a stockout, then fast reaction time now becomes a long reaction time. I've seen a little evidence in Netflix's public statements that they have a degree of load shedding. They've reserved enough machines to service all high priority traffic, plus a couple of layers of buffer, and the buffer gets parceled out for lower priority tasks as space is available, and buy either more base load or more spot servers when that queue gets too long. But... we have the cloud because people have been doing a simplistic version of this for decades in private data centers, the person in charge gets build-out fatigue, possibly before you were even hired, and you practically have to harass them to get enough hardware, or give up and use more man-power to do the same work a computer should be doing, while slowly you lose all respect for the company. Cloud is already built. You just show up and pay 140% of the amortized cost of building and running the system, instead of the up-front cost. Now that person is either easier to talk to or you can just go around them entirely. As I saw someone say recently, "Love is not the most powerful force in the universe, it's spite." Where was I? Oh yes. So we can do this, but to an extent the people who manage to pull it off are remarkable, because so often it doesn't work out, or they succeed in silence and go back to what they really were supposed to be working on now that they've figured out how to get more out of their meager capacity.

hinkley 6y ago

> If you're caught short by a stockout, then fast reaction time now becomes a long reaction time. I've seen a little evidence in Netflix's public statements that they have a degree of load shedding. They've reserved enough machines to service all high priority traffic, plus a couple of layers of buffer, and the buffer gets parceled out for lower priority tasks as space is available, and buy either more base load or more spot servers when that queue gets too long. But... we have the cloud because people have been doing a simplistic version of this for decades in private data centers, the person in charge gets build-out fatigue, possibly before you were even hired, and you practically have to harass them to get enough hardware, or give up and use more man-power to do the same work a computer should be doing, while slowly you lose all respect for the company. Cloud is already built. You just show up and pay 140% of the amortized cost of building and running the system, instead of the up-front cost. Now that person is either easier to talk to or you can just go around them entirely. As I saw someone say recently, "Love is not the most powerful force in the universe, it's spite." Where was I? Oh yes. So we can do this, but to an extent the people who manage to pull it off are remarkable, because so often it doesn't work out, or they succeed in silence and go back to what they really were supposed to be working on now that they've figured out how to get more out of their meager capacity.