In contrast to enterprise systems, the only economically sustainable way of supporting Internet
scale services is to employ a huge hardware base consisting entirely of cheap off-the-shelf
hardware components, such as low-end PC’s and network switches. As Hamilton pointed out, this
reflects simple economies of scale: i.e., it is much cheaper to obtain the necessary computational
and storage power by putting together a bunch of inexpensive PC’s than to invest into a high-end
enterprise level equipment, such as a mainframe. This trend has important architectural
implications for cloud platform design