Elasticity vs. scalability: What your business needs to succeed

If you’ve spent any amount of time in digital marketing operations, it’s likely you’ve heard chatter about “scalability.” You’ve also probably heard the term “elasticity” in the same context — that is, when discussing how to adapt the tech stack to meet changing user demand. 

The terms are often associated with cloud computing, and often used in very close proximity, so you’d be forgiven for thinking that they’re interchangeable. But that’s not really accurate: there is a meaningful distinction between scalability and elasticity, because both terms represent different solutions for demand-related digital content challenges.  

Understanding that distinction not only helps you design and build digital experiences, but ensures that you’re able to deliver them at scale across websites, phones, tablets, and every other corner of the content landscape.

So, let’s take a closer look at scalable and elastic tech stacks, and learn how to use them to optimize your business’s marketing operations.

Defining scalability

Scalability refers to the capability of a system to add (or remove) infrastructure and resources based on a changing workload demand. In a computing context, scalability is planned and persistent: developers adapt their system based on observations about brand or business activities, which might include an increasing number of website visitors, the launch of a new product range, company expansion to a new territory, and so on.  

In a physical computing environment, “adding infrastructure and resources” usually involves integrating new hardware. Cloud scalability, on the other hand, doesn’t depend on (on-premises) hardware, and can be provided as a service. 

There are two types of scalability:

• Vertical scaling: The addition of greater capacity to boost a single resource. This might include adding more memory or storage to a tech stack to help optimize performance, or replacing a single core server with a dual core version to increase computing power. Vertical scaling is sometimes referred to as “scaling up.”

• Horizontal scaling: Also known as “scaling out,” horizontal scaling refers to the addition of multiple copies of a component or service in a tech stack in order to distribute the workload. Scaling out might involve a load balancer serving requests to multiple virtual machines, each performing the same function in order to ensure availability and minimize downtime. 

It can help to think about scalability in terms of a dinner party — and the size of the table you need to seat your guests. If you’ve only got a few friends to invite to your party, you’ll only need a small table. However, if you’re a popular person who keeps making friends, sooner or later you’re going to run out of room, so it’s going to make sense to buy a bigger table to accommodate everyone — a new, permanent feature of your dining room. 

Defining elasticity

Where scalability is a planned and persistent solution to changing demand, elasticity is dynamic and automatic. Elasticity is a real-time process in which a system provisions and deprovisions resources rapidly, as they are needed. 

Elasticity is about efficiency: as demand fluctuates, elastic systems adapt by monitoring resource usage: when resources are needed, elastic systems scale up or out, or both, automatically; when they’re not, they remove them. That efficiency can be cost-effective for companies on strict budgets, because it means they only have to scale resources when there’s an unusually high demand on their tech stacks. 

Back to our dinner party, where elasticity is about the seats at your table. If you’re in the middle of one of your parties, and suddenly find out that four more people want to attend, you can accommodate them by simply grabbing four more chairs from somewhere, and squeezing them in. If those people end up cancelling, no big deal: just take the chairs away. 

Unlike your table, you can easily adjust the number of chairs on the fly to meet demand — they’re an elastic way of scaling your capacity. 

Cloud scalability and cloud elasticity

We mentioned cloud scalability earlier, but it’s worth going into more detail. 

Elastic systems often leverage cloud computing to help deal with dynamic changes in your workload. Cloud computing services are well suited to elasticity because they don’t involve any need for on-premises hardware: they can provide resources and computing power on demand, and you only have to pay for what you use. 

Cloud services can also support scalability. In this context, the cloud service would obviously be integrated as part of a framework in a more persistent, permanent way (rather than a cloud elasticity solution). A business could, for example, pay for persistent cloud storage as a means to manage an increasing volume of customer data.

Cloud elasticity and cloud scalability both offer cost-effective, flexible solutions to growth challenges. In terms of deployment, you’d integrate the necessary parts of your tech stack with your chosen cloud service and then set up your system to use the cloud tools when it needs to. The Contentful platform, for example, uses a scalable cloud infrastructure, to help brands manage growing volumes of content and traffic for their websites.   

Meeting growth challenges with scalable and elastic solutions

The issue of “scalability vs. elasticity” is really a question of how an organization thinks it can best handle its demand-related challenges, and continue to drive revenue. With that said, what kind of business challenges prompt an organization to think about the need to scale?

Business growth: Most commercial organizations are constantly working toward planned growth goals, which means their digital content tech stacks must also adapt to meet increased storage, performance, and data needs as part of that process. 

Unpredictable traffic: Web traffic isn’t always predictable. If some high-profile personality shares a link to your site, for example, or your new product suddenly becomes popular, you could quickly find yourself dealing with an overwhelming amount of traffic. 

Seasonal surges: Holidays, seasonal change, and other periodic variables such as school vacations may drive up temporary demand for a website or online store. The Contentful platform manages a Black Friday traffic surge, for example, on an annual basis. 

Cost efficiency: IT workloads fluctuate over the course of normal day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month business, and so it makes sense for businesses to have some mechanism to scale back resource use during low-demand periods in order to save money. 

Redundancy: If some aspect of the tech stack goes down unexpectedly, other parts of the framework may have to pick up the slack in order to avoid downtime and maintain service to customers. 

When do you need scalability and elasticity?

If both scalability and elasticity help address growth and demand challenges, how do you know when to be scalable, and when to be elastic? It’s an important question, and one which requires consideration of a number of factors, including your organization’s typical workload, available physical and cloud resources, business goals, and content strategy. 

Why scalability? 

Scalability is best suited to businesses that have predictable workloads, or that are seeing slow, relatively uniform growth that enables them to project future workload demand well. Setting up your framework for scalability means that you’ll need to emphasize hardware and infrastructure, and then maintain that hardware effectively so that it does its job when the predicted demand kicks in.

Those requirements typically make scalable systems quite expensive and complex, which might be a barrier to smaller businesses. On the other hand, scalable systems provide much greater control over resource use and customer experiences, and enable developers to customize their tech stacks to a greater extent. 

Scalability use cases:

• Ecommerce stores: In order to manage increased customer demand, online retailers may seek to scale their ecommerce websites horizontally by adding more servers to their tech stacks, or vertically, by replacing existing servers with more powerful models. 

• Data storage: Organizations that need to store large amounts of data, including sensitive personal data, typically need to scale their capacity for storage, while also accounting for corollary factors such as access speed and security. 

• Call centers: Since they’re typically connected to customer-facing businesses, call centers can reliably predict the burden that will fall on their tech stacks over time. They typically need to scale horizontally in order to expand the amount of calls or inquiries that they can handle at a given time. 

• Multi-brand experiences: When an organization manages multiple brands, it may need to create multiple web pages, each delivering different content experiences. Here, it’s typically necessary to scale up server capacity to preserve individual site performance. 

Why elasticity?

Online traffic isn’t always going to be predictable — and that’s where elasticity comes in. 

Elasticity is useful when businesses need to deal with significant fluctuations in website traffic over relatively short periods of time, scaling up resources when they’re needed, and scaling down (to save money and computing power) when they’re not. Cloud computing is usually a fundamental part of elastic scaling because cloud solutions don’t involve on-premises, physical servers, and can be allocated, and paid for, on demand. 

That being the case, businesses that seek to build elasticity into their tech stacks need to understand the costs of their cloud service, and factor that into their scaling plan. It’s going to be more cost-effective to implement cloud scaling for bursts of increased demand — rather than managing the burden of long-term growth. 

Elastic scaling also requires a degree of orchestration and technical expertise. Your developers need to calibrate scaling tools to kick in automatically based on certain conditions, and then roll back based on others. 

Elasticity use cases:

• Streaming services: If your website features media that visitors can stream, elasticity solutions can help you adjust performance based on peak usage. It’s useful to scale video streaming, for example, because it’s particularly resource intensive.    

• Online promotions: Special promotional events (like Black Friday sales or flash sales) that cause a sudden surge of customers can often be handled via elastic scaling. 

• Online gaming: Multiplayer game applications, online casinos, and other participatory online events may use elastic scaling to manage a highly variable player or audience population. 

• Healthcare systems: Many hospital websites or medical advice sites experience a seasonal influx of customers, or have to deal with extreme fluctuations in visitor numbers, while maintaining performance quality — and so are best served by an elastic scaling model. 

Implementing elasticity and scalability in content delivery

Scalability and elasticity aren’t mutually exclusive, you can hybridize your tech stack to lean into the advantages of either approach (or both). For example, an ecommerce business may provision for its expected customer growth by adding multiple servers to its stack, but engage a cloud provider to handle its fluctuating seasonal demand. 

Those are the broad strokes of implementation — how would a business integrate scalability and elasticity on a practical level?

Engage a cloud provider

You’ll need to identify a provider to gain access to cloud infrastructure which you can then integrate with your digital content tech stack. Your cloud provider will offer a range of elastic features and functionalities, including auto-scaling tools. Well-known cloud providers include Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

Develop modular architecture

Modular software architecture is well suited to both scalability and elasticity because the components of a modular tech stack operate independently of each other, and are inherently extensible. In modular content platforms, for example, new features and functionalities can be added quickly and easily — and since communication between modules takes place via application programming interface, there’s no risk of compatibility problems.

Integrate serverless architecture

Serverless architecture leans into the possibilities of cloud computing by abstracting code execution to the cloud — thereby reducing the need for on-site hardware. With pay-per-function pricing models, serverless systems are particularly useful for adding flexibility to the tech stack, and managing traffic fluctuations.    

Implement load balancing

Load balancing involves distributing website traffic across multiple servers in order to ensure consistent computing performance. It’s useful in both scalable and elastic frameworks. 

Deploy containerized apps

Containerization refers to the packaging of a complete application, along with all of its dependencies, in a virtual container — which can run in any environment. The containerized application can be spun up by the framework when it is needed to handle increased traffic, and does not affect the performance of other applications. If an ecommerce website needed to handle a sudden influx of customers, for example, it could spin up containerized instances of its payment gateway to ensure everyone could check out.    

Automate resource tracking

You need a way of knowing when your system is under pressure — and needs to initiate scaling mechanisms. With that in mind, you’ll need to integrate automated monitoring tools with your scaling tools, and define the conditions that will initiate the relevant scalable or elastic features. 

Personalize at scale

When large numbers of customers visit your website, you can leverage elasticity tools at scale to deploy personalized content and increase the likelihood of conversions. Artificial intelligence (AI) support provides a significant advantage for personalization at scale since it allows you to perform advanced data analytics processes with automated speed and efficiency. 

Create scalable solutions with Contentful 

Scalability and elasticity represent ways to optimize the digital experiences you create, and ensure your customers get the best versions of them. 

With that in mind, Contentful has been designed to help you build scalability and elasticity into your tech stack from the ground up. Our platform leverages an API-first design philosophy, and the possibilities of cloud computing, to manage the shifting pressures of digital content delivery seamlessly. With Contentful, you can explore a vast ecosystem of modular microservices, and compose your tech stack to be resilient and adaptable to unexpected traffic, shifting market trends, and any other growing pains that might affect customer experiences. 

We’ve helped the world’s biggest brands expand their digital content offering to new audiences. So, whether you’re working to deliver for a steadily growing customer base, or simply want your next marketing campaign to create an impact, we’ve got the tools you need to make your voice heard.  

Take a tour

Chat with our team

We'll show you how our composable content platform can enhance 1:1 customer connections and drive growth for your business.

Subscribe for updates

Build better digital experiences with Contentful updates direct to your inbox.