[semi-extrinsic]

As a physicist I've always found the name "elastic scaling" funny. If it's elastic in the physical sense, it means that the energy required to grow to some size is quadratic (or higher) in the size. The marketing meaning is "easy scaling", but the physical meaning is "really hard scaling".

E.g. compare a soap bubble versus a bubble gum bubble. It's a lot easier to scale up the soap bubble, which is not elastic.

[javajosh]

It's a very good observation, and I think it's more than just a funny aside. The word 'elastic' connotes increasing resistance as the cluster grows, but this is a false intuition. From AWS's POV 'resistance' to adding a node is generally small, fixed, and, in general, independent of cluster size. I suspect this is what makes cloud computers in general, and EC2 in particular, such a cash-cow.

Moreover it turns out that elasticity is a very valuable quality of a cluster for most workloads; we want this intuition to be true, that our cluster meets resistance as it grows, in the sense that it will shrink when the workload decreases. This matches our economic intuition, too. We want this so much we have to build another software layer to make this happen - e.g., k8s.

[cheerlessbog]

"Quantum leap" is similarly misused to mean"big change" when it's physical meaning is smallest physically possible change"