Most businesses have a peak season when the user is most active, and the application has to handle an additional load to meet demands. Take the classic example of an e-commerce website, selling all kinds of products such as cloth, groceries, electronic items, merchandise, and many more. These e-commerce sites have regular traffic throughout the year but get 10 times more traffic in the shopping season, for example, Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the US, or Boxing Day in the UK. This pattern creates an interesting problem for capacity planning, where your workload is going to increase drastically for just 1 month in the entire year.

In the traditional on-premise data center, ordering additional hardware can take between 4 to 6 months before it becomes application-ready, which means a solution architect has to plan for capacity. Excess capacity planning means your IT infrastructure resources will be sitting idle for most of the year, and less capacity means you are going to compromise user experience during significant sales events, thus impacting the overall business significantly. This means a solution architect needs to plan elastic workloads, which can grow and shrink on demand. The public cloud made this very easy.