WoW is a Cloud

Is Guitar Hero a Cloud?

John M. Willis wrote an interesting post on Merrill Lynch’s “Cloud War” note. He states that with companies like Activision and Digital Reality being labeled as “cloud”, the term is stretched to a degree, that even Guitar Hero might be called a cloud. I agree with John that the word more and more turns into a meaningless brand label, as more and more companies jump on the bandwagon.

Well, WoW is a Cloud (Application)

Nevertheless, I believe that WoW is a true cloud application based on a cloud infrastructure.

What is cloud computing all about? Amazon has coined the word “elasticity” which gives a good idea about the key features: you can scale your infrastructure on demand within minutes or even seconds, instead of days or weeks, thereby avoiding under-utilization (idle servers) and over-utilization (blue screen) of in-house resources. With monitoring and increasing automation of resource provisioning we might one day wake up in a world where we don’t have to care about scaling our Web applications because they can do it alone.

Activision handles massive amounts of user data and surely must deal with significant traffic spikes. They provide a service over the Internet for around 10 Million paying WoW users, utilizing parallel processing techniques on distributed server clusters.

This is what it all is about (imho): dealing with significant amounts of data and massive processing power in the Web and adjusting resource utilization to the current demand with short delay times. If you can do this, you own a Cloud infrastructure. If you provide this service to others, you are a Cloud provider. If you need such an infrastructure for your service or application, you have built a Cloud app / service.

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