In distributed system and system resource, elasticity is defined as “the degree to which a system is able to adapt to workload changes by provisioning and de-provisioning resources in an autonomic manner, such that at each point in time the available resources match the current demand as closely as possible”
Note: Wikipedia quotes Herbst, Nikolas; Samuel Kounev; Ralf Reussner (2013). “Elasticity in Cloud Computing: What It Is, and What It Is Not” (PDF). Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC 2013), San Jose, CA, June 24–28.
Elasticity is the ability of a system to adapt to workload changes by dynamic scaling.