“Elastic architecture” is a concept you will read about more frequently as time goes on. It refers to computer architecture designed such that applications with different roles in different tiers of an application can each intelligently (and elastically) scale up or down to meet processing requirements.
We are not the first people to name this concept. Yahoo.com’s Eran Hammer-Lahav talked about elastic architecture in an August 2007 blog post. In this post he discussed two intersecting themes: applications that could scale themselves, and tiered deployments that rely on a mix of caching, acceleration and replication to keep up with the layers that are horizontally scaling to meet the current load.
Software architect and trainer Simon Brown also came close to naming this concept in a May 2008 blog post. In this post he talked about a “cloud (that) could migrate your data/apps automagically, depending on where they were being accessed from”. This certainly seems like an application that would require multiple layers to intelligently scale horizontally in multiple geographic locations; that’s an example of elastic architecture.
As you probably know by now, DivConq’s main goal is to promote the adoption of highly scalable, cloud-portable technology in multiple tiers of an application. (For example, using Cassandra as the data store at the same time you’re using an application layer built on an array of high-throughput web servers.) Now that goal has a name and we’re proud to promote the adoption of elastic architecture throughout the IT industry.
Published on Monday August 09, 2010 at 09:11am