This document discusses the importance of preparing applications to handle traffic surges and scaling for cloud deployments. It provides examples of outages experienced by companies like Netflix and Best Buy due to applications not being able to scale up during periods of high demand. The document then outlines strategies companies can use to avoid such outages, including using a cloud management platform to quickly provision resources, implement auto-scaling, and build resilient applications. It highlights how RightScale was able to help American Girl deploy a new application to AWS within 14 days using these approaches.