Elastic computing is the ability to quickly provision and scale computing resources up or down based on demand. It's a key characteristic of cloud computing that allows you to pay only for the resources you actually use, rather than overprovisioning and wasting money like it's the dot-com boom all over again.

How to use it in a sentence

• I told my boss we need to move to elastic computing so we can handle the massive influx of users when our new app goes viral and we become the next TikTok overnight.

• With elastic computing, we can finally stop playing "guess how many servers we'll need" every time marketing decides to run a promotion and drive a bazillion users to our site.

If you actually want to learn more...

• Cloud Computing: Martin Fowler breaks down the often-hyped and poorly-defined term "cloud computing" into its key characteristics and service models. If you want to sound smart in your next architecture meeting, read this.

• Automated and Manual Monitoring - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud: Amazon explains how to set up monitoring for your EC2 instances, because apparently even with elastic computing, things can still go wrong. Plus, you'll learn about the joy of cookies (the digital kind, not the delicious kind).

• Scaling Airbnb's Experimentation Platform: Airbnb shares how they scaled their experimentation platform to handle a ridiculous number of metrics, because when you're as big as they are, you have to A/B test everything from the booking flow to the toilet paper in your listings.

Note: the Developer Dictionary is in Beta. Please direct feedback to skye@statsig.com.