What Are the Benefits of Elasticity in Cloud Computing?
You may have heard of the concept of Elasticity in Cloud Computing, but what is it and why is it beneficial to your business and IT applications?
What is Cloud Elasticity?
Put simply, Cloud Elasticity is the automatic provisioning and de-provisioning of computing resources as demand on an IT infrastructure increases and decreases.
Businesses have been enjoying the benefits of moving their applications and IT infrastructure to The Cloud in recent years, and one of the main benefits is that of Elasticity. Continue reading to find out how Cloud Elasticity benefits organisations.
The Benefits of Cloud Elasticity
On-demand computing resources.
Before the age of cloud computing sudden bandwidth and infrastructure demand spikes were dealt with by expanding server and driver architecture. This method of managing demand spikes required large up-front financial investments to cover; hardware, datacentres, power and network bandwidth to list a few. On top of the financial investment, extensive capacity planning would have taken place to justify the expenditure.
With Cloud computing and the benefit of Elasticity this is no longer an issue, as capacity is already accounted for, and in place ready to automatically scale up and down as demand requires. This eliminates the up-front financial and time cost associated with the traditional on-premises methods of setting up application and IT infrastructure architecture.
On-demand computing has three configurations that determine the behaviour of the scaling;
- Monitored Scaling: this is the most common configuration and actively monitors the threshold of existing servers, and handles scaling depending on demand automatically.
- Predictive Scaling: this configuration handles a predetermined scaling up of server capacity based on expected periods of high traffic, such as after the launch of a marketing campaign.
- Scheduled Scaling: similar to Predictive Scaling, this configuration handles server scaling based on expected, regular, high-traffic periods such as peak business hours.
Pay-as-you-go pricing model.
As touched upon previously, on-premise architecture requires heavy up-front financial and time expenditure in order to meet any potential spikes in demand. This results in the majority of the on-premise server and IT infrastructure capacity remaining unused and therefore very cost-ineffective.
Cloud Architecture on the other hand, provides a cost-effective alternative to on-premises, as it alleviates the issues of setting up an on-premise server. There are usually no up-front costs, as The Cloud typically works on a pay-as-you-go basis; you only pay for the computing, networking and storage resources that you actually use. This means you always have the right capacity for your current infrastructure demand, and you’re never paying for idle resources.
High availability and fault tolerance.
As well as Cloud Elasticity handling the scaling of your resources, it also handles the availability; and promises high availability and reliability. This provides a consistent and predictable experience without the risk of servers failing or becoming unavailable.
Resources are previsioned automatically, and many Cloud components such as physical servers and datacentres are isolated geographically with separate power sources and network connections. This means that in the event of an outage such as an isolated server or datacentre failure, your applications and IT infrastructure should remain functioning off of the back of the other available hardware.
Facilitates Growth.
Cloud Elasticity helps facilitate an organisations growth by shifting focus from server provision and on-premise capital investment, to core business functionality. With auto-scaling, high availability and a pay-as-you-go model, Cloud Elasticity and Cloud Architecture is the answer to many of the issues of on-premise architecture.
Why AWS?
Migrate legacy production workloads and mission-critical applications, designed and architected to take advantage of all the AWS Cloud has to offer.
| 1 Operational Excellence | 2 Security | 3 Reliability | 4 Performance Efficiency | 5 Cost Optimisation |
