The Doppler Quarterly Spring 2019 | Page 51

Imagine a scenario where you can set up your cloud platform and forget about it. You know exactly how many cloud resources your business will need for the foreseeable future. The applications you support will not encounter any significant changes in usage, day to day, week to week. All is calm. Everything is taken care of. In the real world, this rarely happens. Cloud usage can swing wildly, especially if you are supporting consumer applications that are popular on particular days or in particular seasons. What you need is an autoscaling capability that lets you expand or contract your resources on a dynamic basis. The question is, how do you handle the scaling func- tion? Do you build it right into the app – creating a so-called elastic application? Or should you let the cloud platform do the work? This is an important issue for companies that are relying on cloud to help them not only manage peak usage situations but also grow their businesses over time. Companies want to have agile systems, keep costs down and avoid having to assign staff to manu- ally turn knobs on a regular basis. Autoscaling can move them in the direction they want to go. While there are advantages to building flexibility right into the app itself, the more com- mon decision people make is to leverage the autoscaling services available in the cloud infrastructure. AWS, Google and Microsoft Azure have all made autoscaling an integral part of their cloud platforms. SPRING 2019 | THE DOPPLER | 49