When there is a sudden surge in traffic to a web application in the cloud, the load on the underlying web servers can go up by several notches. If the load reaches gargantuan levels, the application can slow down or even break down. In order to handle these kinds of situations, the IT team would want to restore the application performance to acceptable levels as soon as possible without bringing the service down. Sometimes they might need to provision extra cloud resources to take care of the increased load. Also, even though cloud platforms dynamically perform load balancing based on resource consumption levels, the IT administrator still needs to ensure sufficient resources are available for his application on the cloud.
