{"id":777,"date":"2007-04-18T09:47:06","date_gmt":"2007-04-18T15:47:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=777"},"modified":"2007-04-18T09:47:06","modified_gmt":"2007-04-18T15:47:06","slug":"intuits_cloudbu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=777","title":{"rendered":"Intuit’s cloudburst frustrates customers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s further evidence of why, as more computing moves onto the web, a broad, shared computing grid is both necessary and inevitable. The servers that TurboTax-maker Intuit uses to process electronically filed tax returns were swamped yesterday as Americans rushed to get their returns in at the last minute. As the Washington Post reports<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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A record number of returns from both individual taxpayers and accountants started causing delays early Tuesday in customers receiving online confirmation their tax returns were submitted successfully, he said. As the midnight filing deadline approached, the problem got worse. During times of peak demand, Intuit was processing 50 to 60 returns per second, [an Intuit spokesman] said …<\/p>\n

Usually, it takes only a few minutes after hitting the submit button for TurboTax users to get a message indicating the transaction had gone through. By Tuesday evening, however, it was taking hours, [the spokesman] said. “If you are sitting there and just did your taxes and want to get assurance it’s been filed, it has to go into the queue,” he said. “We are processing as quickly as we can given the unbelievable demand and the last-minute demand. You can’t increase capability quickly enough to solve the problem for every single individual hitting the OK button.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Intuit is now hoping that customers whose returns were not processed before midnight will not face IRS penalties.<\/p>\n

To run its business with private, dedicated servers, Intuit needs to build its data centers with the capacity necessary to handle the extreme spike in traffic – the peak load – that comes on tax-filing day. Thge vast majority of that installed capacity will go unused most of the time. Multiply that low capacity-utilization rate across thousands of companies, and you get a good sense of the wastefulness inherent in the proprietary model of computing, particularly as companies have to handle rapidly fluctuating web traffic. The only way to do cloud computing efficiently is to share the cloud – to establish a broad, multitenant grid (or a number of them) that balances the loads of many different companies. Otherwise, it’ll be one cloudburst after another, and a whole lot of underutilized capital assets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s further evidence of why, as more computing moves onto the web, a broad, shared computing grid is both necessary and inevitable. The servers that TurboTax-maker Intuit uses to process electronically filed tax returns were swamped yesterday as Americans rushed to get their returns in at the last minute. As the Washington Post reports: A […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=777"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/777\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}