Elasticity in cloud computing and why you need it

Elasticity is one of the most important features and selling points of cloud computing, and is a term often used to describe cloud computing products and/or services. But what is cloud elasticity and why is it so important? Here's why you should care about it and how it benefits your business.

Cloud elasticity refers to the ability of infrastructure resources, such as CPU, bandwidth, storage, etc. to quickly grow or shrink to meet the ever-changing needs of an organization or business. As a company's needs for computational power can vary for a number of reasons, being able to provision and de-provision resources can help reduce IT costs.

For instance, an online store might face a considerable increase in user requests during their peak season, such as just before Christmas. It, therefore, needs more CPUs to handle them during this period. After the holiday season, the number of web requests subsides. It then wants to save money by cutting down on CPUs.

Typically, cloud elasticity is automatic. You don't need to plan out the capacity in advance. The cloud provider will automatically adjust the resources to meet your needs.

There are two types of cloud elasticity: vertical scaling and horizontal scaling.

↕️ Vertical scaling, or scaling up and down, refers to adding more or better CPUs, memory, or I/O resources to an existing server or replacing the existing server with a more powerful one. The number of servers or instances remains the same. When you want to scale down, the capacity of your current servers or instances will be decreased.

↔️ Horizontal scaling, also known as scaling out or in, on the other hand, involves adding additional servers or instances to the existing infrastructure. The workload is then split between several servers, so that they can process the requests without crashing. You can scale in by removing the extra servers or instances.

How does elasticity in cloud computing, namely the ability to grow or shrink infrastructure resources, translate to practical benefits? What do you gain when using this cloud service?

Agility ⚡

With cloud elasticity, you can increase the agility of your business and react quicker to changes in the market, as you no longer need to plan your workload and required capacity, or predict future demand. You don't need to wait for days, weeks, or even months for the infrastructure to be set up to continue your development or business operations. Provisioning and de-provisioning can be done within minutes, allowing you to focus on creating better products to quickly and smoothly adjust your business to the ever-changing market.

Cost Reduction 💰

Cloud providers offer elasticity on a pay-as-you-go pricing option, which means that you will not be charged for infrastructure resources that you are not using.

Without cloud elasticity, you have to plan and predict demand spikes as well as buy and set up infrastructure for those spikes. You then have to deal with the potential running costs of the infrastructure you have no use for until the next time requests increase.

On the other hand, as automatic provisioning and de-provisioning of elastic cloud resources happens in real-time, your resource usage is also closely tracked. Hence, you only need to pay for the services you use.

High availability ✅

Cloud elasticity promises high availability and fault tolerance. Business services can be continued without interruption, since cloud elasticity allows VMs and/or containers to be replicated at any sign that they might be failing, preventing any service outages. You can then provide a better user experience to the users of your application or website.

Businesses of any type and industry can enjoy the benefits of elasticity in cloud computing, with implementations in cloud storage and cloud logs. Here are some use case examples that demonstrate what elasticity in cloud computing means to companies and organizations in actual scenarios.

SaaS/IT 💻

IT and SaaS (software as a service) companies first come to mind regarding cloud elasticity, as adjusting their computing resources is essential when testing and developing new products. SaaS companies also need to take into account changes in the number of their users, especially if this number increases when the company grows rapidly. Cloud elasticity seamlessly enables such growth and scalability without any input from these companies.

Retail/E-commerce 🛍

E-commerce websites typically experience traffic surges during promotional events, seasonal sales, and the release of special items. During these periods, cloud elasticity automatically and appropriately allocates computing resources to meet escalating demand, ensuring uninterrupted service for large numbers of customers to smoothly check out their items and complete their purchases.

Schools 🏫

Schools and educational institutions need to be prepared for increases in website traffic at the beginning of a new school year or registration period, when many students are accessing the school website. With distance learning now more prevalent, especially during the pandemic, streaming lessons and lectures online creates a higher workload for servers. This technical challenge, as well as fluctuations in user requests, is solved with cloud elasticity, which was designed to tackle this obstacle from the beginning.

Media streaming services 📺

Similarly, streaming services need to be able to smoothly handle high volumes of traffic. When popular TV series and films are released, the number of users that are streaming at the same time increases exponentially. With subscribers in the hundreds of millions, Netflix, for instance, constantly faces spikes in server requests. They make the most out of elastic cloud services to provide a seamless streaming experience.

As useful as it is, cloud elasticity comes with some potential challenges for organizations and companies.

• Security impact: One major concern with cloud elasticity is security issues. As the workload fluctuates, security workflows and incident responses will also be impacted, increasing security risk.

• Provision time: Cloud elasticity allows infrastructure to adjust to changing needs on demand, but it might still take a few minutes before it is ready to go. If you are using an application or service with specific needs, the performance might suffer when sudden traffic changes occur, such as provision time increasing when traffic surges.

• Cloud provider lock-in: Cloud elasticity can be implemented differently by various cloud providers despite the fact that they all offer elastic cloud solutions. This difference in implementation complicates the adoption of multicloud services, as the way one cloud provider offers elasticity in their solutions may differ from another cloud provider, making it difficult to switch between the two, or to switch from a single cloud provider to another to begin with.

To avoid this, when it comes to choosing elastic cloud solutions, make sure you understand how they actually work and make the right choice. Select the providers that are more similar to each other, or best suit your company's working culture, to improve work efficiency.

Figure out which cloud solution is the best for you. As a partner of major cloud providers, HiCloud can tailor elastic cloud solutions based on your specific needs. Explore cloud elasticity options provided by AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, CloudFlare, Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud all at once with Hi Cloud. Contact us today!