Elasticity is a defining characteristic of the cloud. Cloud’s ability to scale infrastructure
resources up and down in a dynamic way gives organizations the flexibility to do more,
pay less and operate more efficiently.
But what about the applications themselves that run on the cloud? Are they elastic by
definition? Just because an app in the cloud can accommodate huge spikes of traffic
does not necessarily mean the app is elastic. It is more likely that the app was built with
high-capacity usage in mind. And let us be clear: built for high demand and built to be
elastic are two fundamentally different concepts.
True elastic applications are built to handle variable workloads – and they do so on a
self-aware basis. That means the elastic app is able to automatically add and subtract
resources when certain triggers signal a change of course. Today, we in the industry are
using signals from the infrastructure — inbound traffic from the web and data feeds
from IoT devices, to name just two. However, an elastic app is watching both the infra-
structure and the application itself for signals that tell it to allocate more resources, or
shut some down.
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