Cloud Computing for Competitive Advantage PDF

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eBay is one of the first customers of Microsoft’s new Windows Azure platform appliance for cloud computing. The partnership is a significant joint engineering effort that will couple the innovation and power of the Windows Azure platform appliance with the technical excellence of eBay’s platform. It delivers an automated, scalable, cost-effective capacity management solution. People who use eBay expect the bidding site to give reliable performance and show them listings for almost anything imaginable. If the site crashes at a time-sensitive moment, people could miss opportunities to place winning bids for the things they want most. So, when eBay moved its marketplace of more than a billion listings, the company recognized the task as a substantial undertaking. However, with the help of a team of engineers, it accomplished the transition to Google’s cloud platform in five months. eBay started using Google’s cloud option in a different way by testing machine learning algorithms that assist with image recognition. One machine learning task with a 40-day completion time using eBay’s in-house systems required only four days with Google’s help. Today, its cloud infrastructure runs as many as 7,000 server instances and the internet marketplace is yielding the benefits of running mission-critical workloads in the cloud. The rapid deployment of cloud computing promises network users with elastic, abundant, and on-demand cloud services. The pay-as-you-go model allows users to be charged only for services they use. Now that cloud computing is used in eBay, all of the data can be stored in a cloud, and users trust their website a whole lot more now. People in the past on eBay could cheat and be dishonest users that are able to abuse the system and obtain short-term advantages by deliberately setting large maximum price bids while being charged only at lower Spot Prices. This may also prevent the demands of honest users from being satisfied due to resource scarcity. This no longer is an issue now though thanks to the advancements of cloud computing.

References EBay and Microsoft announce cloud computing agreement. (2010, July 12). Stories. https://news.microsoft.com/2010/07/12/ebay-and-microsoft-announce-cloud-computingagreement/...