Utility Computing

Utility computing has the potential to revolutionize the way we purchase, organize, and distribute computational power and services. It will do so by offloading resource provisioning to centralized sites that can benefit from economies of scale, careful, failure-resilient construction, flexibility and changeability of hardware choices, and scalable and business-driven management techniques. But that promise is useless unless we can move applications from traditional computing environments into utility ones, where the applications are fronted by service interfaces and resource flexing is the norm. This paper argues that such transformations are worthy of study and effort, and suggests that the systems community has a great deal to offer to them.