The Daily Planet #47: Hyperscaling, Part 2

What is a Hyperscalar?

Hyperscalers are massive data centers that provide vast computing resources through elastic cloud platforms, enabling organizations to deploy and manage large-scale applications and services efficiently.

Unlike traditional on-premises data centers, hyperscalers operate at an immense scale, offering unparalleled performance, reliability, and flexibility. The top five hyperscalers--Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), IBM Cloud, and Oracle--serve not only external customers but also run their own applications within their clouds.

Companies leverage hyperscalers to avoid the complexities of managing physical infrastructure, such as space, power, and hardware maintenance, while benefiting from the ability to scale resources dynamically during peak demands, like holiday shopping seasons or month-end processing.

Their global footprint allows multinational organizations to deploy applications closer to local users, enhancing service quality. Hyperscalers are particularly suited for big data and analytics workloads, where massive but intermittent capacity is required, reducing idle resource costs. When deciding what to move to a hyperscaler, businesses should focus on applications that need scalability and flexibility.

Utilizing APIs provided by hyperscalers can automate management tasks and unlock the full potential of these platforms. Overall, hyperscalers represent a transformative approach to IT infrastructure, combining scale, agility, and global reach to meet modern enterprise demands.

Hyperscale computing

In computing, hyperscale is the ability of an architecture to scale appropriately as increased demand is added to the system.