Comment by yardie
3 years ago
Let me take you back to March, 2020. When millions of Americans woke up to find out there was a pandemic and they would be working from home now. Not a problem, I'll just call up our cloud provider and request more cloud compute. You join a queue of a thousand other customers calling in that morning for the exact same thing. A few hours on hold and the CSR tells you they aren't provisioning anymore compute resources. east-us is tapped out, central-europe tapped out hours ago, California got a clue and they already called to reserve so you can't have that either.
I use cloud all the time but there are also blackswan events where your IaaS can't do anymore for you.
I never had this problem on AWS though I did see some startups struggle with some more specialized instances. Are midsize companies actually running into issues with non-specialized compute on AWS?
Our problem was we had a less than 24 hours to transition to work from home. Someone came down with COVID symptoms and spread it to the office and no one wanted to come in. We didn't have enough laptops for 250+ employees. Developer equivalent 16-core, 32GB RAM , and GPU instances is radically different from general compute web front ends. And we couldn't get enough of them. We had to tell some staff to hang tight while checking AWS+Azure daily.
These weren't the typical cheap scale out, general compute but virtualized workstations to replace physical, in office equivalents.
The company I was at in March 2020 had no issues getting more general purpose compute, and our growth was massive