Elastic Computing

What Does Elastic Computing Mean?

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.

Advertisements

Techopedia Explains Elastic Computing

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.

Advertisements

Related Terms

Latest Cloud Computing Terms

Related Reading

Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…