When the cloud can provide better service quality

Last week, the Washington State Elections web site apparently couldn't keep up with the number of voters who went online to check results after the primary elections.

I can only speculate what the root cause is, but if it indeed turns out that the spike in concurrent users is the cause, it woudn't surprise me.

In this blog we've tried to avoid jumping on the bandwagon of talking about the cloud just because everybody else is talking about it. However, here is an instance where I'm going to go on a limb and suggest that the cloud may be a good option for the Washington State Elections web site, for the following reasons:

- Seasonality: Elections result are the perfect example of a very seasonal activity, for which a very elastic computing environment is essential

- Cost: It's more cost effective to rent someone else's computing capacity for such a short period than to try to build it out

- Privacy: This is often mentioned as a barrier to hosting in the cloud. I can't think of many applications more public than election results.

- Service quality: Scalability is an important component of IT service quality. Here, we witnessed an apparent scalability crisis. It doesn't matter if the site is available or performs well under normal circumstances. If it doesn't scale it might as well not exist.

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