April 8, 2021
As a key decision-maker for your business, you’re always facing a litany of uncertainties about the future—which can be both exciting and scary.
If you make smart, safe moves, you’ll likely expand slowly and manageably. But sometimes it’s fun to get wild with high-risk, high-reward moves, which can pay off big and cause your growth to skyrocket.
The types of choices you make shouldn’t be limited by the speed at which you can fiendishly collect new resources, or your ability to make spot-on predictions about how successful you’ll be 18 months from now.
Enter cloud computing.
The scalability in cloud computing is perfect for business owners and C-level executives who need flexibility and convenience.
What Is Cloud Scalability?
Put simply, cloud scalability is the feature of cloud computing that allows the service to change in size.
This ability to increase or decrease IT resources at a moment’s notice to meet a change in demands is the tech equivalent of being able to simply snap your fingers and add a new bedroom to your home every time you have another child.
Cloud Scalability Vs Cloud Elasticity
When you think of scalability, think of a vegetable garden. No, seriously... this is going somewhere.
If you own a vegetable garden, maybe you’re using it to grow tomatoes. And if it turns out all your friends love that fancy pasta sauce you’re making, you can probably just expand the boundaries of that garden further into your yard.
So, next year, you’ll be able to grow even more tomatoes and increase your production.
Cloud scalability is kind of like that. It sets you up to make planned decisions, so that you can expand computing resources easily as your business takes off.
When you think of cloud elasticity, think of a latex balloon that can stretch or shrink quickly depending on how much air you want to put inside.
Cloud elasticity gives a dynamic business extreme flexibility to deal with things like unpredictable surges in website traffic or fluctuating demand for their service.
The Benefits Of Scalability
Here are a few reasons why the scalability of cloud computing could be a great asset to your business. For more detailed insights, check out this post as well.
You Can Grow Or Shrink Quickly—And Easily
Whereas non-cloud computing requires you to purchase and install new hardware before you can scale properly, cloud computing gives you the power to simply click a button when you want to upgrade or downgrade your service.
It’s Non-Disruptive
Upgrading your physical servers may require you to shut down the server during maintenance, and we all know that downtime means a bite out of your weekly revenues. Cloud-computing servers are almost never down for even a short period of time.
There Are No Upfront Costs
Cloud-computing services are sold on a monthly subscription basis, so there are no large upfront investments, and you only have to pay for what you plan to use. You’ll never have to worry about replacing obsolete hardware, either.
The Logistics Are Less Of A Headache
You won’t have to worry about where you’re storing your servers, or whether they’re physically secure. In addition, cloud-computing providers have facilities that are under airtight surveillance and have measures in place to protect the physical servers from fires and natural disasters.
They Come With Disaster Recovery
There’s nothing worse than losing a sea of valuable company data into the void. With cloud computing, you can recover your virtual machines, servers, and data swiftly, and avoid bursting into tears.
Types Of Scaling
There are two types of scaling…
Vertical Scaling
This means increasing the processing power or memory of an existing server.
Horizontal Scaling
This involves adding more servers to your cloud architecture.
Ways To Scale Your Cloud Computing
How you choose to scale your cloud computing will depend on the size and volatility of your business, and your preference for convenience versus control.
Manual Scaling
You can increase or decrease your IT resources at will, whenever you deem it necessary. Manual scaling is perfect for small businesses that don’t know how to accurately forecast their growth.
Scheduled Scaling
Your IT resources will increase at planned intervals based on forecasting you’ve done ahead of time. If you trust your projections, this could take one more small item off your “to-do” list now and then.
Automatic Scaling
Your cloud computing provider will increase your IT resources automatically whenever you reach the limit of your resources. Auto scaling in cloud computing is a “set it and forget it” service, which can be great, but comes at a risk since you’ll also be charged automatically.
Tip The Scales
The concept of scaling in cloud computing can help you save time and repurpose labor resources that might otherwise be spent on tedious scaling tasks, giving you a major advantage over some of your competitors.
Marco offers scalable cloud computing solutions that allow businesses of all sizes to meet their growth and budget needs on the fly, without any need for down time. To learn more about our offerings, reach out to us today.
