> […] to implement a burst-capacity overflow to cloud strategy for their compute needs. 8 years ago the cloud did not effectively exist yet. Today the availabl

> […] to implement a burst-capacity overflow to cloud strategy for their compute needs. 8 years ago the cloud did not effectively exist yet. Today the available capacity surpasses the needs of the prevailing majority of cloud customers, with a caveat – see below. > At this scale the cloud providers were not really able to react or provision fast enough, and required us to reserve the capacity full time. A few things have happened since then: 1. Hardware capacity has been ramped up at a very large scale. 2. Most importantly, advances in the workload distribution and optimisation: the cloud control plane distributes workloads to the available capacity across cloud data centres. The caveat. For most demanding customers, cloud providers have a solution called «the cloud appliance». A truck rolls in with the hardware that gets deployed as an extension of your own private cloud within a few days. Deployed software does not notice a difference and gets automatically distributed to the new processing capacity. If that is not enough, another truck rolls in with another «cloud appliance». It is presumed that if one operates at such a scale, they also have the money to pay for it.