Cloud Elasticity: What Happens When You Lose Control

Basics of Cloud Elasticity

What is cloud elasticity?

In an on-premises environment, you have to pay for the capacity you have regardless of whether you’re using it, and you can’t exceed that capacity without purchasing and provisioning new hardware. In the cloud, however, you have much more flexibility thanks to cloud elasticity, which is the ability to automatically provision or deprovision resources based on workload changes. 

The value of cloud elasticity is that it enables you to meet the resource demand of your workloads at any given time. And because it allows you to shift from the capex focus of an on-premises environment to an opex model, you only pay for what you use, generally speaking (but we’ll dig further into that below). 

How does cloud elasticity work?

To understand cloud elasticity, you first need to understand cloud scalability. There are two kinds of scaling: horizontal and vertical. Horizontal scaling adds/reduces computing nodes as the workload increases/decreases. You’re scaling out or in by changing the number of machines in your pool of resources. Vertical scaling adds/reduces CPU and memory as the workload increases/decreases. You’re scaling up or down by changing the power on an existing machine. 

Is there a difference between cloud scalability and cloud elasticity?

When people talk about cloud elasticity, they’re typically referring to horizontal scaling, although some services, such as Amazon RDS, require vertical scaling. But elasticity and scaling aren’t the same thing and the terms shouldn’t be used interchangeably. Scaling is about how you expand to meet increasing or decreasing demand; elasticity is how you meet the changes dynamically. 

The use of the word “elastic” can get even more confusing

You may see the terms Elasticsearch and elastic IPs, but these don’t have anything to do with cloud elasticity as discussed above. Elasticsearch is a distributed, open search and analytics engine from Elastic, formerly known as Elasticsearch N.V. Elastic IP addresses are reserved public IP addresses that you can assign to any AWS EC2 instance in a particular region until you choose to release it. 

Cloud Elasticity Has Benefits … and Some Risk

Cloud elasticity allows you to deliver a consistent user experience regardless of demand. Because resources are automatically provisioned, you can ensure high availability and reliability, even as your workflows grow and evolve. 

Many might say that cloud elasticity means that you’ll always have the correct resources to match your enterprise’s needs, but we need to be a little careful here. Cloud elasticity means that you’ll always have the correct computing resources to match your enterprise’s workflow needs. It does not, however, guarantee that you’ll always have the correct budgetary resources to match your enterprise’s costneeds. 

Furthermore, it is an overstatement to even say that you’ll always have the correct computing resources to match your workflow needs. There will be constraints depending on the type of instance you create and the configuration options you select. There may be cases where a particular implementation has capacity limits that could cap your costs but could also affect performance. 

The bottom line is that if you’re not paying attention, you could hit performance roadblocks or find an unwelcome surprise in your end-of-month cloud bill—or, worst-case scenario, both. 

How to Maintain Cloud Elasticity AND Control

To get the benefits of cloud elasticity without risking your budget, you need to do three things: 

1. Understand your cloud spend. First, you need to have a clear understanding of exactly what you’re paying for. Unfortunately, this isn’t always as easy as it should be. Your cloud bills, as well as the cost analysis tools available from your cloud service provider (CSP), are useful but insufficient. They provide you with some information but it typically does not allow you to analyze the data from a business perspective or deliver the details needed to make better cloud management decisions. And if you use multiple public clouds, which the vast majority of organizations do, then you need to ensure that you’re able to get a consistent view of spend across your entire multi-cloud environment. 
2. Monitor your cloud activity. Of course, what you spent last month doesn’t necessarily reflect what you’ll spend next month. That’s why you also need visibility into what’s happening at any given time. To be effective, your cloud monitoring capabilities should include cloud cost monitoring, cloud performance monitoring, cloud capacity monitoring, and hybrid infrastructure monitoring.  
3. Optimize cost, capacity, and performance in real time. And finally, it’s not enough to just know what happening, you need to be able to do something about it. While cloud elasticity allows you to scale dynamically to meet changing demand, optimization ensures that you do so smartly—delivering the best performance at the lowest possible cost within your specific risk tolerances. 

Virtana: Your Partner for Smart Cloud Elasticity 

With Virtana Optimize, you can optimize your capacity and cost in real time on an ongoing basis. Our real-time data collection and analytics identify unused resources that can be eliminated so you can stay on budget, even as conditions and options change, and avoid an end-of-month billing surprise. Our powerful analysis and recommendation tools enable you to: 

• Demystify cloud costs through our bill analysis capabilities and cost vs. utilization reports
• Quickly spot wasted spend with proactive and timely emailed reports
• Rightsize your cloud workloads on an ongoing basis to optimize your capacity and costs

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