Cloud elasticity expresses the notion that computing resources outsourced to the cloud can be provisioned according to current needs in real time. This allows a company to react to a temporary increase in load on its servers, without having to be subject to backup IT capacities over the long term.
Cloud elasticity is gaining popularity
More and more companies have outsourced parts of their IT capacity to a cloud. Cloud Elasticity (the « elasticity of the Cloud » in French) refers to the automatic provisioning and recovery of data center resources as customer demand increases or decreases. This allows you to dynamically allocate cloud resources, including compute, storage, and memory, in record time to meet changing needs. Compute resources such as CPU/processing, RAM, I/O bandwidth, and memory capacity can be scaled up and down as needed without affecting system performance through outages .
The goal of cloud elasticity is avoid over-provisioning or under-provisioning of a specific service or application. Over-provisioning (i.e. allocating too many resources) results in more spending than necessary, while under-provisioning (allocating fewer resources) means that not all users can access the service. In recent years, companies have reaped the benefits of moving their applications and IT infrastructure to the cloud. One of the main advantages brought here is elasticity.
What is Elasticity in Cloud Computing?
A flexible cloud service allows you use more computing power and storage when needed, and to restore these abilities when they have become superfluous. The stretching process should be quick and automatic. Any delay experienced by the extension will result in server overload and downtime. On the other hand, servers remain unused when a necessary reduction is delayed, which results in wasted budget allocated to the cloud. When a cloud provider adjusts resource allocation to dynamic workloads so that more or less resources can be consumed, the service is called an « elastic cloud. »
The IONOS Cloud Server supports cloud elasticity.
The faster a cloud service provider can allocate different resources based on dynamic customer needs, the more elastic their cloud services are. This dynamic option offers huge advantages. Before the advent of cloud computing, people reacted to sudden spikes in bandwidth and infrastructure demand by extending the architecture of servers and drivers. This method of handling peak demand required significant initial financial investments in hardware, data centers, power and network bandwidth, to name a few.
With cloud hosting and the advantage of elasticity, this is no longer a problem, as capacity is already taken into account and can be automatically scaled up or down as needed. This eliminates the financial costs and upfront time associated with conventional methods of setting up an on-premises IT and application infrastructure architecture.
What does the elasticity of the Cloud bring to companies?
Elasticity results in a balance between performance and profitability. An elastic cloud provider provides system monitoring tools that track resource usage. They then balance resource solicitation and allocation automatically. The goal is always to match these two metrics to ensure the system is operating at peak performance at a reasonable cost. Cloud providers typically have a usage-based pricing model in their wallet, where the company only pays for what it uses. The Pay-as-you-expand model allows you to add new infrastructure components to prepare for business growth.
The elasticity and scalability of the cloud ensures that customers and cloud platforms can adapt to changing IT requirements. While scalability helps manage long-term growth, elasticity ensures seamless service availability today. It also helps prevent system overload or excessive cloud costs due to over-provisioning. In the case of cloud platforms, elasticity guarantees customer satisfaction. The system offers unfailing availability and remains efficient from start to finish.
Benefits of Cloud Elasticity
- Easy scalability: With on-demand computing resources, Managed Cloud Hosting providers can quickly deliver the services and infrastructure they need to support the business.
- Lower costs: companies can reduce their IT budgets by avoiding investments in IT infrastructure. In the pay-as-you-go model of cloud elasticity, only the resources consumed are billed.
- **Increased Redundancy:**With easy access to external IT resources, IT teams can take advantage of more flexible, reliable, and cost-effective backup and recovery solutions.
- More capacity: elastic cloud storage services offer nearly unlimited storage capacity.
- Simplified management: with cloud services, IT teams no longer have to worry about deploying, maintaining, and scaling up individual parts of the IT infrastructure.
- High availability and reliability: resources are automatically deployed in the background without the end user’s knowledge.
- Increased agility: the elastic cloud makes the IT infrastructure more agile, more flexible and ready to welcome new users or customers.
- Time saving: By automatically provisioning and scaling resources, IT personnel free up time to focus on the core business of your business.
- Increased flexibility as the workload changes: businesses no longer have to worry about their website’s availability as traffic increases.
Cloud Elasticity Use Cases
Elasticity in cloud computing aims to ensure that the resources allocated correspond to the resources actually needed at all times. This means that the elasticity of the Cloud can be used wherever this is to cover peaks in IT capacity.
Ecommerce
Online shopping websites may promote events such as discount sales, promotions, or the posting of special items that attract a larger number of customers than usual. Cloud elasticity helps providers allocate resources appropriately in times of high demand, so customers can make purchases.
A business running an anniversary sale or Black Friday type promotion should expect a lot more traffic and server requests. Servers are under a much heavier load throughout the campaign compared to most other times of the year. An elastic platform makes it easy to deploy more resources to meet the higher demand during the promotion period. The additional capacity can then be returned to the cloud provider.
Customer service
Sectors characterized by a large customer base are also affected by an increase in customer activity during short periods of the year, for example when contracts are modified, entered into or terminated at the end or the beginning of a year. A significant increase in traffic can be expected once that time arrives. Without elasticity, peak traffic quickly overwhelms existing capacity and leads to service interruptions. This would result in messages indicating an “unreachable server” being presented to the user, which would naturally damage the image to the company.
Thanks to the elasticity of the cloud, it is possible to manage demand in real time without customers noticing a change in performance. The corresponding cloud provider will only charge for the resources used, not the number of virtual machines deployed. After the rush of customers to the site, which usually lasts only a few weeks, the elastic cloud platform virtual machines can be rendered to reduce cloud costs.
In short: cloud elasticity saves resources and costs
The elasticity of the cloud gives businesses and IT organizations the ability to handle unexpected spikes in demand without having to have backup devices to handle that demand. The elasticity of the Cloud is a promise for the future for IT infrastructure. It helps businesses stay up and running during peak periods, improves flexibility and availability, and promotes a pay-as-you-go pay-as-you-go model that helps relieve IT budget. With the right cloud provider, you can maximize the elasticity of cloud computing without having to worry about provisioning, managing, or scaling cloud resources.
