Even in a physical hardware, on-premise scenario, it's still easier to scale horizontally than vertically in almost all cases, for all the reasons I mentioned. That's a big reason why Kubernetes was adopted at an unprecedented pace at medium to large organizations - because it helps manage that approach.

that's..kind of not true. they weren't elastic in the sense that you never had to think about how big they were. but you had say 64k nodes, and people would launch jobs with 1000 of them, or 10000, or if if they could clear the decks all of them. or if they were just debugging, maybe 5 of them.

so I guess idk what you mean by 'elastic' here.