Some key cloud concepts (2)

October 06, 2020

1 min read

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Disaster recovery: The ability to recover from an event which has taken down a cloud service. Cloud services disaster recovery can happen very quickly, with automation and services being readily available to use.

Fault tolerance: The ability to remain up and running even in the event of a component (or service) no longer functioning. Typically, redundancy is built into cloud services architecture, so if one component fails, a backup component takes its place. This type of service is said to be tolerant of faults.

Scalability: The ability to increase or decrease resources for any given workload. You can add additional resources to service a workload (known as scaling out), or add additional capabilities to manage an increase in demand to the existing resource (known as scaling up). Scalability doesn’t have to be done automatically.

Elasticity: The ability to automatically or dynamically increase or decrease resources as needed. Elastic resources match the current needs, and resources are added or removed automatically to meet future needs when it’s needed (and from the most advantageous geographic location). A distinction between scalability and elasticity is that elasticity is done automatically.

High availability: The ability to keep services up and running for long periods of time, with very little downtime, depending on the service in question.

Agility: The ability to react quickly. Cloud services can allocate and deallocate resources quickly. They are provided on-demand via self-service, so vast amounts of computing resources can be provisioned in minutes. There is no manual intervention in provisioning or deprovisioning services.