In Greek mythology, Icarus and Daedalus attempt to escape from the island of Crete by constructing wings that were held on using wax. Although Daedalus had warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun, Icarus did not heed the warning, the wax melted, and Icarus perished. To be an "Icarus" or to "fly too close to the sun" is to fail or be destroyed because of lack of caution or excessive ambition.
For any service provider, moving out of the data center and into the cloud can bring an extensive return on investment – optimizing costs by only paying for what you use has saved some service providers thousands and thousands of dollars each year. If you were perhaps on the fence about the potential cloud return on investment, AWS makes it a point to advertise this savings-promised-land to users whenever possible:
As many in our space will contend, telecom resides in a niche and operates under a different set of (perhaps self-inflicted) rules compared to those web apps that are thriving in the cloud. Telecom apps were born in darkness and molded by the place known as ‘on-prem’ with no thought to the possibility of cloud computing. In contrast, the web apps of today were born in the cloud and built to limitlessly scale (a la web-scale).
Theory is fun and scaling real-time communications in theory is simple – components are generic and square Lego-like building blocks that can get scaled up vertically (adding more power to the engine) and/or horizontally (adding more engines to the pool cluster). Scaling ‘just’ happens with more resources being added when needed and removed when done.