thinQmaster Virtual testing partner Adaptive practice exams that find your weak spots and drill them. Every answer explained. From $69
Enroll

thinQmaster

Find your exam

Five questions free, before you decide.

Step 1 · choose a vendor

In one of our camps? Your practice exams come with the tuition — they are on your study page already.

Cloud Computing · Foundational

Rapid Elasticity

NIST cloud characteristic: capabilities can be provisioned and released quickly, often automatically, to scale with demand.

Definition

Rapid elasticity means capacity can be expanded and reduced quickly, in some cases automatically, so that available resources appear unlimited to the consumer. It allows organizations to match supply to demand rather than provisioning for peak load.

Example

An online retailer's web tier grows from 4 to 40 instances during a holiday sale and shrinks back afterward.

Exam tip

Elasticity implies both scaling out and scaling back in; a scenario that only adds capacity permanently describes scalability, not elasticity.

Related terms