What is cloud scalability and elasticity?

Cloud scalability refers to the inherent ability or characteristic of cloud environments to increase or decrease computing resources (CPU, memory, network bandwidth, or storage) to meet an enterprise’s workload demand. This can happen in two ways, either vertical scaling, where you add more power to an existing resource, or horizontal scaling, where you add more instances or nodes. Thanks to cloud scalability, an organization can meet its growing demands as needed without the issue of infrastructure limits. Whether it’s onboarding a thousand new users or expanding your portfolio of applications.

Cloud elasticity, on the other hand, is about real-time flexibility. This is the ability to automatically scale your computing resources up or down (in near-real time) to handle an enterprise’s fluctuating workloads. It’s when you automatically adjust your resources on demand. For example, an e-commerce portal can instantly add a few servers as needed to meet a traffic spike during a festive season sale, for example, and drop them when the sale is over. Similarly, a OTT streaming service, for example, may increase its compute pool during a major live event, and release these resources later to save costs.

Both these abilities are major motivators for enterprises to move to the cloud ASAP, because scalability supports planned, long-term growth initiatives while elasticity enables on-demand, immediate flexibility. The benefits speak for themselves: enterprises pay only for what they use, there's no reason for service slowdowns during peak times, and they can respond faster response to unpredictable demand as well.