The problem with cloud elasticity is that it is often discussed in marketing terms deprioritizing it as a benefit for organizations. As such, in a five part series, I will provide clarity on cloud elasticity by defining the terms and discussing barriers of use. I will be covering the following areas:
In the first of the series, I’m focusing on clarifying exactly what I mean by cloud elasticity.
Definition and Barriers
Let us start by first defining what is cloud. It is proving to be more than a compute platform offering shared, multi-tenant infrastructure. From an IaaS perspective, it is defined as the ability to pay for compute resources only when needed and to scale infrastructure up and down on demand by provisioning and scaling virtual resources based on demand.
Looking at the wider picture, enterprise can choose from various service models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) and various deployment models (private, public, hybrid) with each scenario having unique characteristics to aid the application objectives of an enterprise. Cloud computing, therefore, stimulates a demand for elastic application platforms.
More specifically then, elasticity in the cloud is the ability of an application to automatically adjust the infrastructure resources it uses to accommodate varied workloads and priorities, while maintaining availability and performance in a context-aware environment. There are other important scalable entities in the cloud such as networks and databases and important middleware and monitoring to make it work which I will elaborate on throughout this blog series.
Easily the main obstacle to utilizing elasticity is that most enterprise-application architectures are not designed to take advantage of the elastic infrastructure resources currently inherent to cloud IaaS platforms. These enterprises cannot, therefore, maximize return on investment by achieving quality of service in performance, high availability and automation of requirements by instead provisioning manual storage, network and server resources based on best guess peak usage.
What is clearly required for cloud benefits to be reaped is an elastic architecture using real-time infrastructure and application load monitoring, supporting scalable application components and real-time automation of the provisioning infrastructure.
In the next part of this five part series, we will discuss infrastructure and monitoring.
