What is Cloud Elasticity?

Cloud elasticity refers to how IT resources adapt to system requirements in real time. Companies can quickly and effectively respond to a temporary increase in demand on their servers without needing to commit to a cloud plan that provisions more resources than the company would typically need.

Why is cloud elasticity important?

An increasing number of companies are outsourcing parts of their IT capacities to a cloud. Cloud elasticity is the automatic provisioning and deprovisioning of resources from a data centre when demand from a customer increases or decreases. This allows cloud resources, including computing, storage and memory resources, to quickly be reallocated as demands change. This dynamic adjustment is a typical feature of modern cloud services, which can be scaled as needed.

Computing resources such as CPU, RAM, input/output bandwidth, and storage capacities can be increased or decreased as needed, without interrupting system performance.

The goal of cloud elasticity is to avoid over- or under-provisioning of a particular service or application. Over-provisioning (i.e., allocating too many resources) leads to higher costs than necessary, while under-provisioning (allocating too few resources) means not all users can access the service. In recent years, companies have benefited from the advantages of moving their applications and IT infrastructure to the cloud. One of the main benefits is elasticity.

What is elasticity in cloud computing?

An elastic cloud service allows you to use more computing power and storage when needed, and release them again when the additional capacity is no longer required. The elasticity process must happen quickly and automatically. A delay in scaling up would lead to server overloads and downtime. Conversely, if a necessary scale-down is delayed, the servers would remain unused, which would waste the cloud budget. When a cloud provider adjusts resource allocation to dynamic workloads, enabling the use of more or fewer resources, the service is referred to as an elastic cloud. Elastic cloud platforms are often cloud-native systems specifically designed to seamlessly adapt to changing workloads—without manual intervention.

The degree of cloud elasticity depends on how fast a cloud provider can allocate different resources in response to changing customer requirements. Offering this dynamic option is an enormous advantage. Before the era of cloud computing, the server and driver architecture had to be expanded to respond to sudden peaks in demand for bandwidth and infrastructure. This approach to handling peaks in demand required large upfront financial investments in hardware, data centres, power and network bandwidth.

This is no longer a problem thanks to cloud elasticity and affordable cloud hosting solutions. Capacity can now be automatically increased or decreased as needed. This eliminates the upfront costs and installation time associated with traditional methods of setting up an application and IT infrastructure architecture on site.

What does cloud elasticity bring to a company?

Elasticity improves company performance and is cost-efficient. Elastic cloud providers have system monitoring tools which track and analyse the utilisation and allocation of resources. These two metrics should match to ensure that the system is performing at its maximum capacity and at a low cost. Cloud providers typically offer a usage-based pricing model, where the company only pays for what it uses. With the ‘Pay as you expand’ model, new infrastructure components can be added to prepare for growth.

Cloud elasticity and cloud scalability ensure that both customers and cloud platforms meet the changing demands of data processing. While scalability helps manage long-term growth, elasticity ensures seamless service availability in the present. It also helps prevent system overloads or excessive cloud costs due to over-provisioning. In cloud platforms, elasticity ensures customer satisfaction. The system remains smooth and high-performance throughout.

What are the advantages of cloud elasticity?

• Easy scalability: On-demand computing resources allows managed cloud hosting providers to quickly deploy the exact services and infrastructure a business needs.
• Lower costs: Companies can reduce their IT budgets by avoiding investments in IT infrastructure. Using the pay-as-you-go model for cloud elasticity means that you are only charged for the resources you use.
• Greater redundancy: IT teams can leverage more flexible, reliable and cost-effective backup and recovery solutions with accessible off-site computing resources.
• More capacity: Elastic cloud storage services offer virtually unlimited storage capacity.
• Easier management: With cloud services, IT teams no longer have to worry about provisioning, maintaining and upgrading individual parts of the IT infrastructure.
• High availability and reliability: Resources are automatically provisioned in the background without the end user noticing.
• Increased agility: The elastic cloud makes IT infrastructure more agile and flexible, allowing new users or customers to use the system with ease.
• Increased productivity: Automatically provisioning and scaling resources gives in-house IT staff more time to focus on core business functions.
• Increased flexibility with workload changes: Organisations do not have to worry about their website crashing when traffic increases.

How is cloud elasticity used?

The goal of cloud elasticity is to ensure that the resources that are allocated correspond to the resources required needed at any given time. This means that cloud elasticity is implemented wherever peaks in required computing capacity need to be adjusted.

E-commerce

E-commerce websites may host events such as discount sales, promotions, or limited-edition items, which can attract a larger number of customers than usual. Cloud elasticity allows for adequate resources to be allocated during increased demand so that customers can make their purchases.

A company running an anniversary sale or Black Friday promotion can expect a lot more traffic and server requests. This puts more pressure on servers than at other times of the year. An elastic platform allows for flexible resource provision to accommodate this higher demand. The additional capacities can be returned to the cloud provider afterwards.

Customer service

Industries with existing customers may also experience high customer activity at certain periods during the year. For example, when contracts are changed, canceled or terminated at the end or beginning of the year. These times of year are generally associated with a sharp increase in data traffic. Without elasticity, this spike in traffic would overwhelm existing capacity and lead to a service outage. ‘Server unavailable’ messages would appear on users’ screens and reflect poorly on the company.

Cloud elasticity makes it possible to manage demand in real time without customers noticing a change in performance. The respective cloud provider will also only bill for the resources used and not for the number of virtual machines provided. Once the rush in traffic has ended, the virtual machines can be released from the elastic cloud platform to reduce cloud expenses.

Summary: Cloud elasticity saves resources and costs

Cloud elasticity gives enterprises and IT organisations the option to handle unexpected surges in demand without having to maintain the extra equipment. Cloud elasticity is a forward-looking feature for IT infrastructure. It helps companies stay operational during peaks in demand and improves flexibility and availability. It also leverages a pay-as-you-go model, which is cost-efficient for IT budgets. Businesses can get the most out of cloud elasticity computing by choosing a cloud provider who oversees the provisioning, managing and scaling of cloud resources.