Introduction
When it comes to the cloud, you often hear terms like scalability and elasticity. While they sound similar, they actually mean quite different things. In this article, we’ll break down what it means for a service to be scalable or elastic—and which one is most important for your business.
Scalability
Scalability is the ability to increase the capacity of a system. It’s how much you can grow your business before it breaks, and how much it costs to scale up.
- What does it cost? To scale, you need more servers, storage space and bandwidth. So when you start growing fast enough that those things become too expensive or difficult to acquire quickly enough–that’s your limit for now!
- How long does it take? Scaling up involves changing some aspect of your architecture (e.g., adding more machines) so that there are fewer bottlenecks in performance-critical parts of your application (e.g., database queries). Depending on how challenging this task turns out to be in practice, the process could take anywhere between minutes/hours if everything goes smoothly all the way up through months if something goes wrong along the way due either human error or unforeseen technical problems caused by changes made during development cycles which inadvertently cause unexpected side effects elsewhere later down line when deployed production systems start interacting with each other during normal operations mode once again…
Elasticity
Elasticity is the ability to scale up or down as needed. It’s about being able to handle bursts of traffic, add more capacity when needed, and then take it away when you no longer need it. The cloud service provider handles all of this for you so that you don’t have to worry about scaling your servers manually–you just pay for what you use.
Elasticity is not scalability because it doesn’t address how many resources are available in total (i.e., number of CPUs). For example: if a website has an elastic architecture but only one CPU core available at any given time then its ability to handle bursts will be limited by those limitations regardless of how well designed its codebase may be
Understanding the difference between scalability and elasticity can help you choose the right cloud service for your business.
Scalability is a measure of how much you can scale up (or down). It’s the maximum capacity that a system can handle, regardless of its current state.
Scalability is often confused with elasticity, which refers to the ability to add resources on demand when they’re needed and remove them when they’re not. Elasticity is often measured in terms of time: how fast you can add or remove resources from your system will determine whether it’s considered elastic.
Conclusion
Scalability and elasticity are two key concepts when it comes to cloud computing. Both can help you improve the performance of your business, but they are not the same thing. By understanding their differences and how they apply to your needs, you’ll be able to choose the right cloud service for your company.
