On Delivering Embarrassingly Distributed Cloud Services

Abstract

Very large data centers are very expensive (servers, power/cooling, networking, physical plant.) Newer, geo-diverse, distributed or containerized designs offer a more economical alternative. We argue that a significant portion of cloud services are embarrassingly distributed – meaning there are high performance realizations that do not require massive internal communication among large server pools. We argue further that these embarrassingly distributed applications are a good match for realization in small distributed data center designs. We consider email delivery as an illustrative example. Geo-diversity in the design not only improves costs, scale and reliability, but also realizes advantages stemming from edge processing; in applications such as spam filtering, unwanted traffic can be blocked near the source to reduce transport costs.