Elasticity is the degree in which the system is able to adapt to changes by provision and deprovision of resources in an automatic manner. The available resources should have a direct relation with the provision of needs you receive from any service offered. From a point of appreciation, when more resources are assigned to a system, the system may not use all of these resources, it will cost more to pay for the extra resources not used. On the other hand, allocating limited number of resources to a system, means the service cannot reach all the user requirements. Web users end up giving up on the service, loss interest in accessing it and cause a drastic depreciation to you as the service provider because you will not make any profit with the limited or no users at all. The customers run away from the slow and unreachable service and look for a better channel to fulfil their consumer needs.
What are some of the advantages of Elastic cloud Hosting?
Server specification
When a business/individual has leased or want to have a physical server, he/she have the right to select the server that is tuned to meet their specific needs. With this the user will have unlimited resources to use and meet all his hosting needs.
Utility based platform
You pay for only services offered to you. For example, for any internal hardware device, that some organizations take advantage of overcharging for services that you will not fully utilize, you only spend on the resources you have used. This maintains an elastic environment and ensures maximum utilization of resources.
Operational benefits
An elastic system, maintains the flexibility of the business by providing quick services depending on the application demands and the evolving requirements of the business.
Save on cost
Maximum utilization of allocated resources saves on infrastructure cost. Organizations do not buy, install or operate other equipment, they are hosted by the hosted by a public host provider.
Easily accessible
Elastic cloud is offered more readily to public cloud environments meaning a service provider make resources like Virtual machine, applications available to the general public over the internet. Public cloud may be freely offered. Some of the public clouds available for use include Amazon elastic cloud, IBM Blue cloud, Google App engine and windows Azure.
Elasticity aims at matching the amount of resource offered to a service with the amount of resource it requires.
Drawbacks of Elasticity in Cloud Hosting
It is time consuming in terms of any cloud virtual machine provided may take sometime before it is ready for use. For a virtual machine to start, it depends on various factors like the type of the virtual machine, data center location and the number of virtual machines. Any control mechanism of elasticity must consider the time taken for elasticity to take effect.
Resources allocation is based on the user specific need. When deploying applications in the cloud infrastructures, requirements of the user need to be considered first before the quality, cost and other factors are given a priority.
The Elastic applications are rapid to change and therefore they need to be monitored because they can allocate or deallocate resources based on demand for specific applications.