[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.