Is every service of AWS Elastic?

[Monica Shiralkar]

Elastic in cloud computing means ability to adjust to increased work loads by scaling. In AWS, there is concept of scaling. Does this mean that every service of AWS is Elastic? Thanks.

[Tim Cooke]

In short, no.

[Monica Shiralkar]

Thanks. I thought every service in AWS has ability to scale and handle when workload increases since that is a feature of Cloud computing.
Which is an AWS service that is not elastic ?

[Tim Cooke]

It can be a feature of cloud computing but is not a definition of it.

I deliberately didn't elaborate in my previous reply because there are so many services and am not going to categorise them all for you. For starters though, EC2 is not an 'elastic' service.

[Tim Moores]

Also keep in mind that "cloud computing" is such a broad and ill-defined term that it includes lots of different hosting approaches - many of which are not elastic at all.

[Monica Shiralkar]

Tim Moores wrote: many of which are not elastic at all.

Means which will not scale and adjust to increased workload? What are names of some of such services?

[Tim Holloway]

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) isn't elastic?

Amazon Cloud services, as others have noted, are many. Some of them provide scalable resources, but some of them are such that a single resource instance can handle the entire client infrastructure.

[Monica Shiralkar]

Tim Holloway wrote:Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) isn't elastic?

What I understand is that EC2 is elastic.
But what I am asking is some of the services which are not Elastic.

[Monica Shiralkar]

Tim Holloway wrote:Some of them provide scalable resources, but some of them are such that a single resource instance can handle the entire client infrastructure.

Thanks.
What are the names of some service of the latter type (not elastic )?

[Tim Moores]

It's probably easiest to check Amazon's documentation on the particular services that you are interested in.

[Monica Shiralkar]

Tim Moores wrote:It's probably easiest to check Amazon's documentation on the particular services that you are interested in.

Sure. What exactly do I need to check for like do I need to check whether the elastic keyword is there in the documentation?

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

You are looking for words like elastic or serverless. The question of which services are elastic is backwards though. You need to start with what you are trying to accomplish and what services might meet that need.

For example. DynamoDB is elastic. But that knowledge doesn't help you if you don't need a database.

[Monica Shiralkar]

Jeanne Boyarsky wrote:DynamoDB is elastic.

What is the reason that it is called elastic ? That it can be scaled ? If so is there any service which cannot be scaled ?

[Tim Holloway]

It's called elastic because it can be scaled dynamically. That is, you scan spin up and down identical copies (instances) of the elastic service without having to start/stop/pause the operation of that service. Or, for that matter any other service.

So two essential characteristics of an elastic service are that all instances are identical (interchangeable) and that there should be a service that can automatically apportion work for them.

[Monica Shiralkar]

Thanks

Tim Holloway wrote:It's called elastic because it can be scaled dynamically. That is, you scan spin up and down identical copies (instances) of the elastic service without having to start/stop/pause the operation of that service.

And does it happen automatically ?

It's called elastic because it can be scaled dynamically.

In that case how are elasticity and scalability different?

[Tim Holloway]

Monica Shiralkar wrote:
In that case how are elasticity and scalability different?

If I have 10 instances of Tomcat and I need 15 and I can add the extra 5 servers without major changes in how things are set up, that is scalable.

If I can do so without having to pause or stop or otherwise interfere with the existing servers or their environment, then that is also elastic. And especially if I can go the opposite direction - removing servers without interfering with processing, then that is elastic.