What is Elasticity in the AWS Cloud?
Transcript:
Hi, I’m Todd Bernson – CTO at Blue Sentry Cloud and an AWS Ambassador with 12 AWS certifications.
I’m often asked by Executives to explain Cloud native architectures so I’ve put together a multi-part series explaining common patterns and Technical jargon like container orchestration, streaming applications, and event-driven architectures.
First, the most basic idea to understand in the cloud is its elasticity.
This simple concept encompasses all six pillars in the AWS well-architected framework.
These pillars are operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability.
Let me first talk about what we are used to on-premise or data center architectures.
Operations has a set amount of resources that are over-provisioned to be able to handle the maximum load expected for application use.
Many of these expensive resources are left idle for hours a day.
At the same time resources which are at a premium are not available at scale for things like development, project work, or time-sensitive reporting.
Architecting and building in the cloud is completely different from the Legacy mindset.
Phrases like only pay for what you use and elastic architecture are phrases commonly used when discussing benefits of the cloud.
AWS Elasticity and Scalability
But what exactly does that mean?
Simply put, cloud operations looks to break apart tightly coupled applications as much as possible into decoupled stateless applications that can scale when needed instead of having a giant server running a load balancer web application and database together.
Each of these pieces is put into a scaling group the more traffic that comes in the more servers or instances are automatically put in place to help handle that traffic.
Each layer of the application is separated from the others so only the layers that need to scale at any time will scale.
When the resources are no longer needed the layers scale back in again automatically to save on cost.
Your app is always up, always resilient, and always available to your customers.
Elasticity takes Legacy architecture and makes it more operationally excellent, secure, reliable efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable.
Blue Sentry Cloud is the most densely certified Cloud firm in the country and we would like to be of service to you.
Thank you.