Being tied to the physical constraints of hard-drive space, CPU, memory and bandwidth is one of the limitations of physical hosting. But with cloud computing, you can focus on building your infrastructure for success rather than worrying about whether your in-house infrastructure can handle the constraints of success in the first place.
When something is elastic, it can expand and then snap back to its original size. With infrastructure, that means various components can be added or removed from the infrastructure to make it larger or smaller, as needed. From an infrastructure standpoint, the cloud allows you to programmatically add or remove servers using a control panel or an Application Program Interface (API). This is where the “rapid provisioning” comes into play.
Depending on the cloud environment, you may be able to get much more granular with your control. While the most typical example of scaling involves simply adding cloud servers to or removing cloud servers from your infrastructure, you may also be able to scale at a “component” level; in other words, you may be able to add or remove RAM, hard drive space, CPUs and even networking.
There are specific use cases for needing to scale these individual components. Operating systems and applications are often very RAM-hungry, meaning they will consume all available memory and consequently run more efficiently when more RAM is available.
Database servers tend to perform better with more RAM and CPU cores. And since many web, social and financial services generate terabytes of data, hard drive space — potentially in the form of cloud or attached storage — is a core element of scalability. A Big Data implementation, for example, may actually require numerous hard drives configured in various RAID arrays in order to store data and make it highly available. If your data storage is physically constrained, your business cannot scale.
All businesses, regardless of size, should consider their scaling strategy. If they don’t, they are setting themselves up for failure. Although it’s fairly obvious why large enterprises need to be elastic in their infrastructure provisioning as they add new products or services, smaller businesses need to be agile as well, especially if their business models are tied to seasonality or important product announcements that can drive traffic to their sites.
There is nothing worse for a business than to have its website or web hosting service perform lethargically or time out. This represents a loss of revenue and may alienate customers. If customers are turned away at the “digital door,” they may not come back. If your infrastructure is programmatically configured to monitor traffic spikes, or if you have analyzed your traffic or infrastructure utilization over time, you can get ahead of the curve so that you have infrastructure ready and available when it’s demanded, scaling back when the need (and traffic) subsides.
Moving to a cloud hosting environment means that you can grow your business and online presence easily and stay agile in the process, allowing you to save not only on infrastructure cost and management. Ensuring your infrastructure scales as your business does isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s a must-have of modern IT.