What is Cloud Elasticity?

What is cloud elasticity?

Cloud elasticity is an aspect of cloud computing. It describes how organizations can increase or decrease their cloud resources as needed without causing any disruption to their cloud services. As workloads shift and customer demand fluctuates, you can very quickly adapt to those changes by adding or removing compute, storage, and memory resources at a moment’s notice.

The increase or decrease of resources can be manual, in which an IT professional realizes a spike in business is coming and goes into the system to add resources, or automatic, where the system reacts automatically to quickly expanding or shrinking needs. Automatic elasticity is typically offered by cloud service providers, whether an organization uses them for infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), or software as a service (SaaS).

There are two main types of elasticity in the cloud. Scale out/in elasticity describes adding or subtracting cloud instances to accommodate changing conditions. Scale up/down elasticity describes adding or subtracting resources from existing instances.

With cloud elasticity, organizations can meet rapidly fluctuating demands without having to purchase or manage on-premises equipment. They can simply “cloud burst” when business spikes and handle added workloads in the cloud until it’s no longer needed.

How it works

While cloud bursting can be manually initiated by IT—either by anticipating a known business spike or by receiving an alert that resources are running low—automatic cloud elasticity is designed to be completely invisible to the end user. The process entails:

• Automated application monitoring – Application performance and usage are monitored automatically in the cloud so the system knows when CPU capacity or memory, for instance, is running low.

• Predefined triggers – According to limits set by IT or the cloud service provider, the app monitoring system will alert the platform to increase or decrease cloud resources when those limits are reached.

• Pooled resources – The cloud service provider has a pool of shared compute, storage, and networking resources that can be accessed in a couple minutes (or less) when needed. The right amount of resources are automatically provisioned and available to the organization on demand.

• Automatic deallocation – When the business spike has passed and the extra resources are no longer needed, the system automatically deallocates them. It helps keep costs down, as organizations only pay for what they have used.

See how Nutanix Cloud Platform can integrate seamlessly with your existing cloud infrastructure and applications.

Cloud elasticity vs cloud scalability

Because they both entail adding or subtracting resources to accommodate computing needs, cloud elasticity and cloud scaling are sometimes considered the same thing. But there are subtle differences:

• Cloud scaling is typically deliberate and a result of capacity planning for future growth. When you scale compute, storage, or memory resources, you keep them even if you don’t use them. You can scale back and subtract resources, but again, it’s more of a deliberate result of planning. Scaling is more focused on long-term stability.

• Cloud elasticity is more about maintaining a baseline of resources and then being able to quickly get more if you need to. When the extra resources are no longer needed, they are deallocated and you return to your baseline. Elasticity is focused on short-term or unpredictable demand fluctuations.

Benefits of cloud elasticity

• Cost savings – With cloud elasticity, you pay only for the resources you use. You also save on costs by using cloud resources and don’t have to purchase or manage equipment on-premises. Elasticity eliminates over-provisioning, which can cut into budgets.

• Increased flexibility – You can quickly adapt to evolving market trends or pivot when business spikes. No worries about under-provisioning and being caught unprepared when demand skyrockets.

• Enhanced availability and resiliency – Elastic cloud resources means you always have compute, storage, and memory when you need it. And because it’s so easy and quick to spin up new resources, you increase resiliency and avoid downtime with automatic replication when virtual machines fail.

• Competitive edge – With the ability to stay flexible, adapt on the fly to customer and market demands, and speed time to market, you can gain a competitive advantage. 

Challenges of cloud elasticity

• More complex data management – Moving data and applications where you want them (and where they run best) can be a bit more complex with cloud bursting. IT might not have the expertise and skills needed to manage such a variety of environments.

• Integration with existing infrastructure – Legacy systems can be complicated to integrate with elastic cloud resources.

• Impact to security – When cloud resources are added or subtracted, it can affect existing security configurations and workflows. The elasticity can also have an impact on your compliance with data privacy and sovereignty guidelines. 

Choose multicloud and hybrid cloud strategies for maximum elasticity

While it might add some complexity to your infrastructure, cloud elasticity and being able to cloud burst can be great benefits to your organization’s ability to meet customer demands.

To optimize the value of cloud elasticity, many organizations opt to use multiple cloud environments to achieve more flexibility in scaling. Organizations are also increasingly moving to a hybrid approach, combining on-premises environments with cloud and edge resources. This gives them maximum flexibility for workload placement and also for cloud bursting to accommodate demand fluctuations.

A hybrid multicloud model is inherently more complex than a simple on-premises data center, but there are so many solutions available today that make it intuitive and efficient. The best solutions typically have centralized orchestration tools that allow you to manage all of your disparate environments as a single unified ecosystem.