Understand Cloud Services and Computing Concepts

Thought experiment

In this thought experiment, demonstrate your skills and knowledge of the topics covered in this chapter. You can find answer to this thought experiment in the next section.

Wingtip Toys has a website on which they sell their products to customers worldwide; it is the company’s primary source of sales. The website is hosted on a server farm in the company’s data center, which is a small room in the building’s basement. The incoming traffic is distributed among the servers by a load-balancing switch. Richard, the administrator of the site, regularly monitors the website traffic and, as the holiday season approaches, he sees the traffic level rise almost to the point at which the servers are overwhelmed.

There is no budget for the purchase of additional web server computers, and there is also no room for more servers in the data center. Reading about cloud options, Richard thinks that there might be a solution there. How can Richard expand the web server farm to handle the increased traffic for the least expense by using the cloud?