Elasticity is a fundamental concept underpinning cloud computing that, when deployed appropriately, can allow you to create highly responsive, reliable and cost effective applications in the cloud.
In essence elasticity allows the capacity of a given cloud environment to increase and decrease in response to demand.
As an example of how this might help, imagine that you have a website that normally runs happily on a single server in the cloud but suddenly you are “slashdotted”.
What’s that, I hear you say? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect
Your single web-server won’t be able to cope with the massive spike in traffic and eventually collapses in a heap. Using the elasticity of the cloud however, extra web servers can be automatically provisioned to meet with the demand. Yes – automatically without intervention or preparation.
After the surge of extra users dies down again, the extra web servers can then be automatically decommissioned. Since cloud services are typically purchased on a “pay for what you use” basis then this means that you can match the resources you pay for very closely with what you actually need, based on demand.
Elasticity is usually associated with horizontal scaling of capacity – in other words adding extra servers to an existing set of servers. It is also possible to scale vertically – that is increase the resources (CPU, memory etc.) available to a given server. Vertical scaling is harder to undo when compared to horizontal scaling however, making it less suitable for the flexible increases and decreases of capacity that elasticity attempts to address.
This is all in very stark contrast to traditional IT infrastructure where you would have to purchase enough capacity up front to cope with demand. This would mean that most of that already paid for capacity would typically go un-utilised for lengthy periods of time so that you are more than likely paying far more than you actually require. You are also reliant on your demand estimate model being correct!
How to achieve it
In the world of Amazon Web Services elasticity is mainly achieved using a combination of Elastic Compute Cloud virtual servers (EC2), the AWS Auto-Scaling service and AWS Elastic Load Balancers (ELB). It is possible to define an auto-scaling group which maintains a certain minimum number of EC2 web or application servers and monitors an appropriate metric (typically CPU usage). The auto-scaling group can then add additional EC2 servers to the group if the metric rises above a certain level. This group of servers can then be registered with an elastic load balancer which distributes requests evenly to the servers. If the CPU load drops back down below a predefined level then the additional EC2 servers can be terminated.
Elasticity is a fundamental concept underpinning cloud computing that, when deployed appropriately, can allow you to create highly responsive, reliable and cost effective applications in the cloud.
Cloud is about how you do computing, not where you do computing.