Elasticity is a service’s ability to handle bursts of traffic. It’s often confused with scalability. Scalability is the ability to handle a large number of concurrent requests.
Although these two are different, elastic systems also need scalability.
For example, ticketing or bidding systems usually need elastic scaling as they will have bursts of traffic in a short amount of time. They need to scale up and down with a different load of requests coming in. However, a growing no-discount e-commerce website will scale differently as it probably won’t need any elasticity and can scale up with the overall increasing number of users.
We might need to uncover the real need for the software. Sometimes, these Architecture Characteristics might come with requirements, but some of them can be hidden in the problem domain.
Serverless architecture is one of the most elastic systems. You pay-per-use, and it scales up and down all the time by adding more resources when you trigger a serverless function.
