Cloud computing
Scalability of cloud computing: what it is and the different types
The concept of scalability is one of the cornerstones of resource management within disciplines such as computer science and telecommunications, and the term itself has enjoyed a surge in popularity thanks to cloud computing, particularly with regard to service-based models.
But what does scalability really represent when it comes to cloud computing? What are its benefits? How can it be achieved?
These are the questions one is especially entitled to ask when one finds oneself examining the range of services provided by cloud service providers to identify those best suited to meet one’s workloads, with a priority factor related to controlling so-called cloud costs.
What is the scalability of cloud computing?
The scalability of cloud computing refers to the ability to increase or decrease the IT resources required to meet workloads, which can vary in both quantity and variety over time.
Scalability, along with the pay-as-you-go approach, has always been one of the main hallmarks of cloud computing, and is a major driver of adoption by organizations engaged in their digital transformation journey.
From a technological perspective, scalability is the ability to vary the IT resources allocated in the cloud infrastructure, which basically include the processing capacity, memory, and storage needed to run applications.
What made the impact of the cloud on the IT market disruptive was precisely the extraordinary agility and speed within which this process takes place, thanks to virtualization technologies, which allow resources to be made available at the logical level without having to configure them each time at the hardware level.
In other words, through a simple control panel, users can access cloud services and self-service scale the resources they need, effectively paying only for what they use.
Scalability and elasticity of the cloud
In the IT literature, especially the Anglo-Saxon literature, scalability is associated or used, more or less improperly, as a synonym for elasticity. While having many commonalities, elasticity refers to the system’s ability to scale resources to meet the IT-level demands of workloads with extreme precision. Cloud infrastructure is metaphorically identified as a rubber band, always stretched to the right point.
In more practical terms, the difference between cloud scalability and elasticity can be interpreted as follows. In the former case, the configuration of resources remains a mostly manual process, where the user has to know exactly what to ask for, while in the latter case there are interfaces that can automatically scale resources even in real time, as in the case of serverless services, which are widely used in the context of software development.
Regardless of whether or not IT resources can be dynamically reallocated, scalability and elasticity of the cloud are concepts that travel in parallel, having in common their main goal: to meet customers’ IT needs so that they can use what they actually need, while minimizing the risks of over- and under- scaling that are reflected in unnecessary costs or inefficiencies at the operational level.
Horizontal scalability
Horizontal scalability involves adding or removing additional machines from the existing infrastructure. In the case of the cloud, these are mainly new machines, physical or virtual, to be configured according to one’s needs, similar to what would happen in the case of purchasing a new server to be placed in the on-premise data center.
Although this is a somewhat complex and labor-intensive method, it is the choice that allows the IT department to have the greatest level of control over the infrastructure, even in the case of services whose resources are physically located at third-party providers.
Horizontal scalability is useful and advantageous especially in long-term contexts, to implement projects intended to have a significant life cycle and especially to have to guarantee a high availability context. In fact, distributing workloads across multiple machines allows configuring failover to always have the lowest possible downtime should problems occur in the normal delivery of services.
Vertical scalability
In the cloud context, we talk about vertical scalability when it comes to adding or removing individual elements of hardware resources, i.e., CPU, GPU, RAM, storage, and network bandwidth, in addition to a number of options that are part of the specificity of the individual offering on the market.
Compared with horizontal scalability, defining individual resources presents an at least theoretically simpler approach than configuring entire virtual machines, as it essentially results in a simple remote control interface that allows operators to manage the resources needed for optimal application execution without having to worry about everything else.
Leading hyperscalers have over time progressively improved the vertical scalability of their services, which now occurs with near real-time operation.
Diagonal scalability
Diagonal scalability contemplates the simultaneous adoption of horizontal scalability and vertical scalability in the context of an IT architecture designed in a highly agile manner to take full advantage of all the benefits offered by services in the cloud marketplace.
The advantages of a scalable system
An increase in available IT resources almost always results in an increase in costs relative to the service. Scalability in itself is an important quality to exploit, but a priori it does not equate to an automatic guarantee of success in cloud adoption. Analyses and evaluations need to be carried out that are targeted to the solution of the specific case.
Companies need to be well aware of the necessary cloud architecture skills and the high level of knowledge of the applications to be deployed that is required to efficiently implement truly scalable solutions over time. If these qualities are not available in-house, expert and qualified consultants can be used, and these should be recognized in the possession of certifications related to the technologies used and demonstrable experience in the field.
When properly implemented, cloud scalability enables organizations to gain important benefits.
Initial investment waiver and cost control
With the scalability of the cloud, organizations can avoid the large and complex initial investment in hardware-software infrastructure, which in addition to the availability of capital involves highly articulated choices in anticipation of actually quantifying the quantity and quality of resources needed. The risk, concrete and recurring, is to over- or under-estimate.
An on-premise system cannot be scaled up at the click of a mouse, and excess purchases result in unwarranted expense in any case. This kind of complexity in the cloud is completely forgotten, in favor of an overall agility toward innovation that is unprecedented for business.
In addition to these aspects, organizations pay only for what they need in the time they actually use it, avoid the obsolescence of proprietary hardware, and can have solutions that are always secure and up-to-date thanks to cloud service providers, who bear the entire burden of managing and maintaining the infrastructure, from which they derive a commercial profit due to the economies of scale of the public cloud.
Rapid availability of resources for applications
Cloud scalability provides for rapid resource allocation, which can be configured through simple and intuitive control panels accessible from any web page. Administrators can monitor the active status of the service and choose whether to increase or decrease resources according to the demand of their workloads. Once changes are made, the availability of allocated resources is guaranteed within a short average time, at least as far as the most authoritative cloud providers are concerned.
Performance and flexibility as a function of business
Organizations are constantly starting and stopping new projects, which require useful IT resources to run their applications. The scalability of the cloud therefore solves a historical problem in IT, related to an infrastructure that is too static to cope with the speed at which business grows and declines over time. At the same time, SMBs can also access services that in the on-premise environment they could hardly have afforded, benefiting their business innovation.
Redundancy and disaster recovery
Scalability also applies to the multicloud context, which makes it possible to reduce costs for the infrastructure allocated to data recovery, as there is no longer a need to build and maintain secondary data centers. In fact, the necessary redundancy can be achieved quickly by varying the resources allocated across multiple storage services offered by different clouds.
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