Being able to scale your business and IT operations up or down is a must-have ability in today’s landscape. Scalability is one of cloud computing’s best advantages and its capabilities are being utilised by some of the UK’s most versatile and adaptable organisations.
In this guide, we outline what cloud scalability is, and the difference between cloud scalability and cloud elasticity.
What is cloud scalability?
Cloud scalability in the cloud computing landscape refers to the ability to increase or decrease IT resources as needed to meet different levels of demand.
An easy-to-understand example of cloud scalability is…
Suppose your website’s traffic sky-rockets overnight and your non-cloud physical server can’t handle this influx – your website crashes and you lose customers. Alternatively, if you have a cloud-based server, this increase in traffic will be handled accordingly as it can dynamically scale up to deal with the demand – your website carries on as normal and you gain customers.
Types of cloud scalability
If you’re new to cloud computing, you’ll often hear engineers talk about the two main types of scaling – horizontal and vertical.
Vertical scaling
When scaling a cloud system vertically, you essentially add more power to an existing part of the structure. This can result in more memory (RAM), faster storage such as Solid State Drives (SSDs), or more powerful processors (CPUs). Vertically scaling your cloud computing solution also results in very little (if any) additional configuration on a software level.
Horizontal scaling
When scaling a system horizontally, you generally add more servers to spread the workload across multiple cloud-based machines. With this, however, comes added complexity to your system. You now have multiple servers that require general administration tasks such as software updates, security and monitoring but you must also now sync your application, data and backups across many systems.
Difference between cloud scalability and cloud elasticity
Cloud computing providers can offer both elastic and scalable solutions for their clients. While these two terms sound very similar in essence, cloud scalability and elasticity are not the same.
Cloud elasticity refers to a system’s ability to increase or decrease dynamically in response to changing workload demands, like a sudden drop in web traffic. An elastic cloud system automatically adapts to match resources with demand as closely as possible, in real-time. An organisation that experiences variable and unpredictable workloads might seek an elastic solution in a public cloud system.
