Elastic Computing

Updated: Sat, 28 Mar 2015 by Rad

Elastic Computing - is a concept in cloud computing in which computing resources can be scaled up and down easily by the cloud service provider. Elastic computing is the ability of a cloud service provider to provision flexible computing power when and wherever required. The elasticity of these resources can be in terms of processing power, storage, bandwidth, etc.

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Cloud computing is about provisioning on-demand computing resources with the simplicity of a mouse click. The amount of resources which can be sourced through cloud computing incorporates almost all the facets of computing from raw processing power to massive storage space.

Besides providing these services on demand basis, the resources are elastic in nature, i.e. they can be easily scaled depending upon the underlying resource requirements on run time without even disrupting the operations and this ability is known as elastic computing. On a small scale this is done manually, but for larger installations, the scaling is automatic. For example, a larger provider of online video could setup a system so that the number of webservers online scaled during peak viewing hours.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud - pioneer in Elastic Computing

There are now few big worldwide players in Elastic Computing field, but the company who pioneered everything is Amazon.com

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a central part of Amazon.com's cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS). EC2 allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications.

Pay for what you actually use

Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios.

Elasticity is commonly understood as the ability of a system to automatically provision and deprovision computing resources on demand as workloads change.

Big players in Elastic Computing

Cloud computing is the technology still creating the most buzz amongst IT professionals. The two most commonly cited examples of cloud offerings come from Amazon.com and Google, both of which basically rent their data-center resources to outside customers.

• Amazon
• Google
• Rackspace
• Microsoft
• IBM
• Citrix
• Dediserve
• Digital Ocean
• FireHost
• ElasticHosts
• GoGrid

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Elastic Computing - from around the web

• Elastic Computing (EC)
• Elasticity in Cloud Computing: What It Is, and What It Is Not - usenic.org
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud - Amazon
• Cloud computing: Hot technology for 2009 - networkworld

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