A cloud infrastructure function that can grow and shrink to meet peak demand quickly is known as ___.

A cloud infrastructure function that can grow and shrink to meet peak demand quickly is known as ___.

• A. elasticity
• B. federation
• C. automation
• D. caching

Answer: (A)

Elasticity is the cloud capability to automatically scale resources up and down to meet demand. This directly describes growing and shrinking capacity in response to peak usage, helping maintain performance while controlling costs. In practice, systems use auto-scaling rules to add more compute instances when traffic rises and reduce them when traffic falls, often guided by metrics like CPU usage or request rate. Other terms don’t capture this dynamic scaling concept. Federation deals with sharing identity across domains, automation refers to performing tasks automatically (not specifically scaling), and caching stores data to speed access (again, not about resizing resources).

Elasticity is the cloud capability to automatically scale resources up and down to meet demand. This directly describes growing and shrinking capacity in response to peak usage, helping maintain performance while controlling costs. In practice, systems use auto-scaling rules to add more compute instances when traffic rises and reduce them when traffic falls, often guided by metrics like CPU usage or request rate.

Other terms don’t capture this dynamic scaling concept. Federation deals with sharing identity across domains, automation refers to performing tasks automatically (not specifically scaling), and caching stores data to speed access (again, not about resizing resources).