Elasticity in Cloud Computing: State of the Art and Research Challenges

Elasticity is a fundamental property in cloud computing that has recently witnessed major developments. This article reviews both classical and recent elasticity solutions and provides an overview of containerization, a new technological trend in lightweight virtualization. It also discusses major issues and research challenges related to elasticity in cloud computing. We comprehensively review and analyze the proposals developed in this field. We provide a taxonomy of elasticity mechanisms according to the identified works and key properties. Compared to other works in literature, this article presents a broader and detailed analysis of elasticity approaches and is considered as the first survey addressing the elasticity of containers.