What feature of Alibaba Cloud ensures applications maintain high availability?

Elasticity is a crucial feature of Alibaba Cloud that helps maintain high availability for applications. It allows the cloud infrastructure to automatically adjust the resources allocated to an application in response to changing workloads. When demand increases, the system can seamlessly provision additional resources to handle the load, ensuring that the application remains responsive and performs optimally. Conversely, when demand decreases, resources can be deallocated, which helps in managing costs without compromising performance.

The ability to adapt in real time means that applications can withstand spikes in traffic and maintain performance levels, ultimately contributing to high availability. This is particularly important for applications that experience variable workloads, as it helps ensure that they can accommodate user demand without downtime.

Other concepts such as scalability, while related, refer more specifically to the ability of a system to grow in capacity and accommodate more resources as needed over time. Data compression deals with reducing the size of data for storage or transmission, and static resources refer to pre-allocated resources that do not change dynamically with current application demands. These features do not directly address the dynamic adjustment necessary for maintaining high availability in response to changing workloads.