Elasticity is the ability of an application or system to handle workloads that vary by automatically increasing or reducing resources / capacity as needed. For example, a web application can scale up to handle increased traffic during peak times and scale down during periods of low activity.
Cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud offer services for autoscaling. Developer can define rules for adding or removing virtual machines, containers, or other resources based on metrics like CPU utilization or number incoming requests. This enables the application to handle fluctuations in traffic without manual intervention and preventing downtime due to over-loading.
Explore related concepts
Scalability
Scalability is the ability of an application to handle an increasing load, such as a growin number of users or requests witout experiencing downtime or performance degradation.
Autoscaling
Autoscaling is the ability of an application to automatically adjust its resources based on real-time demand, ensuring optimal performance and cost-efficiency. This enables applications to dynamically scale up or down in response to changes in traffic, without manual intervention.
Metrics
Metrics are a way to measure and track the performance and behavior of a system, application, or service. They provide valuable data on things like response time, error rates, and resource utilization.