Traditional Enterprise Workloads

The majority of existing enterprise applications fall into this category, including those from Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. These applications are typically built to run on a single server or on a cluster of front-end and application server nodes backed by a database. Traditional workloads typically rely on technologies such as enterprise middleware clusters and vertically scaled databases.

Cloud-era Workloads

Internet companies such as Amazon, Google, Zynga and Facebook have long realized that traditional enterprise infrastructure is not enough to serve the load generated by millions of users. In response, they pioneered a new style of application architecture that does not rely on enterprise-grade server clusters, but rather on a large number of loosely coupled computing and storage nodes. Applications developed this way often utilize technologies such as MySQL sharding, no-SQL and geographic load balancing.