As an increasing number of applications and services are being made available over networks such as the Internet, an increasing number of content, application, and/or service providers are turning to technologies such as cloud computing. Cloud computing, in general, is an approach to providing access to electronic resources through services, such as Web services, where the hardware and/or software used to support those services is dynamically scalable to meet the needs of the services at any given time. A user or customer typically will rent, lease, or otherwise pay for access to resources through the cloud, and thus does not have to purchase and maintain the hardware and/or software needed.
In this context, many cloud computing providers utilize virtualization to allow multiple users to share the underlying hardware and/or software resources. Virtualization can allow computing servers, storage device or other resources to be partitioned into multiple isolated instances that are associated with (e.g., owned by) a particular user. A cloud computing provider usually assigns one or more virtual machines to each of its customers, and the virtual machines are used to execute the applications and/or other workload for those customers. A number of issues and inconveniences may occur, however, when the processing load of the customer begins to exceed the capacity of the virtual machines due to an increase in demand or other reasons.