Are long VM instance spin-up times in the cloud costing you money? That's the question that immediately came to mind when James Urquhart, in an interview at the Stata Conference, made this thought provoking comment: the faster you can get the resources into the hands of the people who use them, the more money you save overall.

One of the many super powers of the cloud is elasticity, the ability to dynamically acquire and release resources in response to demand. But like any good superhero, their strength must also form the basis of a not quite fatal flaw. Years and years of angsty episodes are usually required to explore this contradiction.

In the case of the cloud, the weakness reveals itself in slow VM spin-up times. Spinning up a VM in EC2 can take a little as 1-3 minutes, or can average 5-10 minutes, or it can take much longer if there's heavy usage in your availability zone. EC2 is not alone. A common complaint about Google App Engine is the cold-start problem. When a request comes in, an application must be initialized to handle it, which takes time, which means the end-user experiences increased latency.