It happened again.

The ‘royal fashion trend effect’ crashed yet another site on 27th November, 2016, as the engagement announcement of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle went public, resulting in a flood of shoppers attempting to buy the stylish coat which the princess-to-be was wearing as images went live.

The nature of Black Friday is changing, with the trend leaning toward more and more brick-and-mortar retailers staying closed on the big post-Thanksgiving (in the US at least) ‘biggest shopping day of the year’. But this isn’t just an altruistic reprieve on the part of retailers, giving their employees a well-deserved day off with their families: the new reality is that most people are doing their shopping and searching for the best deals online.

As more companies look to move their infrastructure to the cloud, Varnish too has gone virtual. Improving web performance and securing scalability and availability grow more important by the minute, but maintaining on-premise infrastructure isn’t always practical for every business. Serving up a virtual infrastructure that puts control in the hands of the user, Varnish Plus Cloud - now available on Google Cloud Platform as well as AWS and Azure - lets you flexibly manage how much memory, storage and CPU you use and scale the infrastructure up or down as needed.

As Varnish Plus Cloud has expanded its availability to more cloud platforms (today it’s available on AWS/Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure), we thought it would be worth looking at the difference between elasticity and scalability.