Which term describes automatic adjustment of resources in a cloud environment in response to workload changes?

Which term describes automatic adjustment of resources in a cloud environment in response to workload changes?

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

Answer: (A)

Elasticity is the automatic adjustment of resources in a cloud environment in response to workload changes. When demand increases, the system can scale out by adding more compute instances or capacity; when demand decreases, it scales back in to avoid paying for idle resources. This relies on monitoring metrics such as CPU utilization, request rate, or queue depth and uses scaling policies, load balancers, and orchestration features to distribute traffic and maintain performance while controlling costs. This differs from federation, which is about coordinating or importing resources across multiple domains or providers; automation, while it involves performing tasks automatically, doesn’t inherently imply scaling resources up or down based on workload; and caching, which stores frequently accessed data to speed up retrieval, does not adjust resource capacity in response to demand.

Elasticity is the automatic adjustment of resources in a cloud environment in response to workload changes. When demand increases, the system can scale out by adding more compute instances or capacity; when demand decreases, it scales back in to avoid paying for idle resources. This relies on monitoring metrics such as CPU utilization, request rate, or queue depth and uses scaling policies, load balancers, and orchestration features to distribute traffic and maintain performance while controlling costs.

This differs from federation, which is about coordinating or importing resources across multiple domains or providers; automation, while it involves performing tasks automatically, doesn’t inherently imply scaling resources up or down based on workload; and caching, which stores frequently accessed data to speed up retrieval, does not adjust resource capacity in response to demand.