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Describe the benefits of using cloud services

Steve Pettifer edited this page Oct 4, 2024 · 2 revisions

The benefits of high availability and scalability in the cloud

High Availability

  • High availability focuses on ensuring the maximum availability regardless of disruptions or events that may occur
  • Azure services have availability guarantees but they may differ with product or service tier, and these should be considered when architecting a solution. The guarantees are part of the SLAs

Scalability

  • Scalability is the ability to adjust the resources available to meet demand. Peaking traffic can overwhelm a system but the ability to scale means you can add more resource when you need to to handle that demand
  • Scalability also means you do not need to pay for the resources to handle your peak traffic all the time: You can scale elastically and not pay for the peak time resource in a quiet period
  • Scalability can be horizontal or vertical. Vertical increases or decreases the capabilities of resources, whereas horizontal adds to or removes from the number of resources

Vertical scaling

  • Vertical scaling might be adding CPU/RAM to an spp, or lowering the amount of CPU/RAM for that app as required

Horizontal scaling

  • A sudden steep jump in demand might need more instances of an app to handle demand. This can me manual or automatic, such as adding VMs or containers (scaling out), or conversely reducing VMs or containers (scaling in)