July 26, 2011, 12:50 PM — Imagine the kind of infrastructure needed for a website fielding 1.5 million requests per second. That was one of the challenges faced by Yahoo's Todd Papaioannou, vice president of cloud architecture.
[Also see: 7 days in the cloud: My week with the Samsung Chromebook and Survey shows IT still focused on the wrong issues about cloud]
"What's my biggest pain spot? No, it's not Google," he recently quipped with attendees during his keynote speech at the Cloud Leadership Forum, held last month in Santa Clara, Calif. "My biggest problem is elasticity. VM spin-up time. Virtualization isn't there yet." Ten to 20 minutes is just too long to handle a spike in Yahoo's traffic when big news breaks such as the Japan tsunami or the death of Osama bin Laden or Michael Jackson.
RESEARCH: Public cloud vs. private cloud: Why not both?
To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.
