Elasticity

Elasticity refers to the ability of cloud computing resources to scale up or down to meet changing demands. The goal of elasticity is to provide enough computing resources to handle current workloads and demands without over-provisioning.

Elastic cloud resources allow applications to quickly acquire more resources when needed to handle spikes in traffic or workload. Then, as demand decreases, the resources can be released and scaled back down. This provides flexibility and cost savings, since organizations only pay for the resources they are actively using. For example, a web application may be hosted on elastic virtual machine instances that can automatically spin up more VMs during peak hours and spin them down during lower traffic periods. The cloud provider takes care of managing the scaling process behind the scenes. Other examples of elastic resources include auto-scaling groups of containers or serverless functions that launch to meet demand. The key benefit of elasticity is the ability to automatically scale resources up or down based on real-time operational needs.