According to Gartner, cloud computing is expected to become a business necessity by 2028. In other words, it will cease being seen as merely a disruptive technology. Consequently, cloud scalability assumes increased importance. However, firstly, it is important to look at the impact cloud-based solutions have had on the business landscape.
Global spending on public and private cloud computing has been measured at around $679 billion in 2024 (Gartner). This market is predicted to touch $947.3 billion by 2026 (Spacelift), indicating an insatiable demand for cloud services. Already, in 2024, some 60% of business data is stored on the cloud (Spacelift). This percentage is bound to increase in 2025 and the following years judging by the fact that the global cloud computing market is growing at a CAGR of 16.3% (Spacelift).
Expenditure on the public cloud, which constituted less than 17% of enterprise IT spending in 2021 is expected to go past 45% in 2026 (Spacelift).
To sum up, the future lies in the cloud.
Revisiting Scalability in Cloud Computing
It is common knowledge that scalability in cloud computing refers to the capacity of a cloud computing setup to manage the growth in workloads by dynamically increasing resources like network capacity, processing power, and storage. However, some conflate scalability and elasticity in cloud computing.
Elasticity, as opposed to scalability, merely refers to resource modification within servers already in use to manage changes in workload demands. It does not expand the cloud environment. Scalability does.
Scalability can increase resource availability in three ways. Scaling can be done vertically, horizontally, or diagonally.
Vertical scaling adds power to an existing server by boosting storage, CPU power, or RAM. On the other hand, horizontal scaling involves adding additional servers to improve workload distribution. Finally, diagonal scaling is a combination of both vertical and horizontal scaling. It involves adding servers as well as upgrading the resources available to them.
With these crucial fundamentals out of the way, let’s look at what advantages cloud scaling can provide in 2025.
The Advantages of Cloud Scaling in 2025 & Why You Should Care
Cloud scaling continues to offer advantages over on-premises data handling as in previous years. However, some of the recent offerings from AWS, Azure, and other players have accentuated these advantages.
Better cost optimization: Moving into 2025, it is now easier than ever to quickly scale server resources upward or downward as needed. Consequently, it is a breeze to negate non-required spending and save on expenses.
Better agility: Quicker cloud scaling will allow businesses to keep abreast of changes in the market and scale their infrastructure as required.
Better collaboration: In 2025, cloud scaling will allow dispersed teams to quickly access the data and apps they need, allowing for better collaboration.
Quicker AI model training and deployment: In recent years, the cloud has made it more straightforward and cost-effective to train and deploy large AI models. In fact, AI model training and quick deployment on cloud environments has become the norm in industries like healthcare (drug discovery, medical imaging), financial services (fraud flagging, algorithmic trading), retail (demand prediction, chatbots), and telecommunications (network optimization).
Improved product recommendations: Moving into 2025, AI-powered cloud environments have shown their prowess at improving customer experience by making timely and relevant product recommendations to customers and increasing cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
Easier marketplace integration: The cloud enables easy plug-and-play integration to popular marketplaces by virtue of being API-first.
Reduced IT expenses: Transitioning to the cloud in 2025 will negate the need for big IT teams to manage servers on-premises. After all, cloud providers handle the underlying hardware in such a setup.
Rapidly improving security: Finally, scaling on the cloud allows businesses to take advantage of modern advancements in cloud security like effective AI- and ML-driven threat detection and zero-trust architectures.
Cloud Scalability Best Practices for 2025 & Where Organizational Priorities Lie
The need for scalability on the cloud has increased as a growing number of organizations have moved the bulk of their processes online. Based on organizational insights from Aspire’s The Moving Cheese event held at Chicago, moving into 2025, cloud success is increasingly seen through the prism of cost reduction, shortening timelines, reducing the number of operational data centers, leveraging financial controls, and demonstrating operational excellence and continuous improvement. Considering these organizational priorities, organizations would do well to incorporate the following best practices:
- Move from monolith to microservices: The move from monolith to microservices architectures, which was underway in 2023 and 2024, will continue in 2025. Use a microservices-based approach to speed up app-development on the cloud and negate the need for building from scratch when changes are needed.
- Choose the right scaling strategy: Over the past few years, organizations have increasingly realized that not every scaling strategy fits every organization. Using the wrong scaling strategy when not required can lead to avoidable cost escalations. Consequently, choosing the scaling approach that suits your business is crucial and will help save on costs.
- Use a containerization-based approach: Using containers to build the individual components of a cloud app has been growing in popularity in recent years. Utilize containers to help make your cloud development process modular and build scalable cloud solutions that can be quickly deployed.
- Utilize edge computing: Cloud latency is a concern for many businesses. Consequently, edge computing will be a definite trend in 2025. Moving computation and data storage closer to the devices and sensors that generate them will markedly hasten data processing.
- Leverage serverless computing: Moving into 2025, serverless computing is growing in popularity. This approach abstracts server infrastructure and allows businesses to run code without the need to manage servers. As a result, IT resources are freed up.
- Choose a competent cloud partner: Partnering with the right cloud partner can mean the difference between success and failure in the cloud. A competent cloud partner can help boost scalability and optimize your architecture on the cloud.
A Word About AWS and Cloud Scalability
It is important to specifically discuss AWS and cloud scalability. If your organization is looking at optimizing scalability in the cloud, it is hard to look past AWS. After all, it is the largest player in the cloud space with a 32% market share as of 2024 (Spacelift).
The AWS Well-Architected Framework, which is free for all users of AWS, provides visibility into how well an organization is using AWS. It assists with cloud optimization by helping to build and deploy faster, lowering or mitigating risks, enabling informed decision making, and providing clarity on AWS best practices. These factors put together help to boost scalability on the cloud.
If your organization is keen to scale its operations on the cloud with AWS, Aspire Systems can be your reliable partner to manage the process. Aspire Systems is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner and has a team of 300+ trained cloud experts. We have 400+ cloud engagements under our belt as well as 100+ ready-to-use assets and reference architecture libraries for AWS. Whatever your specific cloud needs may be, our bespoke offerings have you covered.
Cloud Scalability Solutions and Services to Watch Out For in 2025
AWS and Azure are the two largest players on the cloud scalability solutions and services market. Here are some of their notable offerings to watch out for in 2025.
- Amazon Bedrock enables developers to quickly build and scale generative AI applications utilizing foundational models.
- AWS Q Developer is a generative-AI-based software development assistant that helps with code completions and generates snippets of code. It can help economize the amount of code used.
- Azure Data Lake Storage is a secure, scalable data lake storage service for storing/processing large quantities of data.
- Azure Arc is a cloud management offering that helps manage infrastructure and applications across multiple clouds.
Regardless of the cloud environment you use, a capable cloud partner can help you save on costs and scale up or down as required.
The post Cheatsheet: Best Practices to Boost Cloud Scalability in 2025 first appeared on Aspire Systems.