Elasticity in cloud computing: a survey

Cloud computing is now a well-consolidated paradigm for on-demand services provisioning on a pay-as-you-go model. Elasticity, one of the major benefits required for this computing model, is the ability to add and remove resources "on the fly" to handle the load variation. Although many works in literature have surveyed cloud computing and its features, there is a lack of a detailed analysis about elasticity for the cloud. As an attempt to fill this gap, we propose this survey on cloud computing elasticity based on an adaptation of a classic systematic review. We address different aspects of elasticity, such as definitions, metrics and tools for measuring, evaluation of the elasticity, and existing solutions. Finally, we present some open issues and future directions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on cloud computing elasticity using a systematic review approach.