The global market for cloud computing grew from $266 billion in 2019 to an estimated $289 billion in 2020. While the COVID pandemic had a lot to do with that, many companies realized the benefits of the cloud as a result.
The ability to scale is one of the cloud’s biggest advantages. Let’s look at cloud scalability and how it works.
What is Cloud Scalability?
Cloud scalability means the ability to grow or shrink the resources you have available as your business needs change. Cloud computing makes it easy to adjust many resources, including:
- Storage
- Processing power
- Server bandwidth
- Networking infrastructure
These changes can typically get made on the fly, with no downtime for your website or other connections.
Why Cloud Computing is Easily Scalable
Cloud computing uses virtualization to provide computing power to its users. When you spin up a server in the cloud, the provider creates a virtual server with the resources you need.
This could mean you only get a small share of the resources of a particular server or you could get several servers working together to deliver the services to you.
Cloud Scalability vs. Elasticity
There are two ways that cloud services can adjust to your changing needs — scalability and elasticity.
Cloud elasticity means the resources available to you change on-demand. For example, if you’re hosting your website in the cloud, the cloud provider can dynamically adjust the resources available to your website if it sees a sudden spike in traffic. Once the demand slows down, the extra resources get released.
Cloud scalability works similarly but instead of doing it on-demand, you can scale your resources up in anticipation of greater needs. You can also scale things down if you don’t need as much power — the scalability is in your hands.
Types of Scalability in the Cloud
There are three types of cloud scalability. Each of them gives you flexibility in different ways, depending on what you want to accomplish.
1. Vertical Scalability
Vertical scalability is also known as scaling up or scaling down. This lets you adjust the resources you have available to meet an increase or decrease in your workload.
2. Horizontal Scalability
Horizontal scalability is also known as scaling in or out. Instead of expanding the number of resources you have available, this adds more nodes with the same resources.
Adding nodes will help improve performance by giving you more compute power where vertical scaling lets you work on larger projects with the same performance.
3. Diagonal Scalability
Diagonal scalability is a combination of the first two types. This lets you increase the resources available for your workload while also improving its performance by adding additional nodes.
Benefits of Cloud Scalability
Cloud scalability offers several benefits over traditional computing, where you had to buy more hardware to expand your resources. The major benefits include:
- Faster and easier to scale as your needs change
- More cost-efficient than spending capital on new hardware
- Better performance and higher capacity are available on-demand
These advantages are all available with just a few clicks.
Don’t Get Caught Short of Computing Resources
If your computing needs change regularly, cloud scalability is hard to beat. By migrating your projects into the cloud, you never need to get caught short of computing power again.
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