End of Software, The: Finding Security, Flexibility, and Profit in the On Demand Future

Chapter 4. It's About the Performance

When mission-critical applications are overloaded with data, are swamped by user requests, or experience any of a number of other situations or events that negatively affect them, their slow performance can severely impact a company's bottom line. That much you know already. Time spent waiting for the computer to cough out an answer is, essentially, wasted. The challenge of designing, building, sizing, deploying, and managing high-performance, cost-effective solutions has long been pursued in the industry.

Many traditional means have depended on having smart people with slide rules to make estimates and forecast on both how to characterize the workload generated by a user and how to estimate the capabilities ...