What is Ethel investigating when interconnected her private cloud with a community cloud?

When Ethel interconnects her private cloud with a community cloud, she is investigating the concept of bursting. Bursting refers to the ability of a private cloud to extend its resources to a community cloud when there is a demand for additional capacity that exceeds the available resources in the private cloud. This is particularly useful for handling peak loads or unexpected spikes in demand without requiring the organization to permanently increase its capacity within the private cloud.

By utilizing bursting, organizations can take advantage of the scalability offered by the community cloud environment, which is shared among multiple organizations with common interests. It allows for cost-effective resource utilization, as the private cloud can 'burst' into the community cloud only when necessary, maintaining efficient operational costs during regular load periods.

In contrast, the other options, such as elasticity, vertical scaling, and autoscaling, while related to cloud resource management, do not specifically address the concept of interconnecting a private cloud with a community cloud to handle shifting loads dynamically. Elasticity refers to a system’s ability to automatically provision and deprovision resources based on demand, while vertical scaling and autoscaling involve adjusting resources within a cloud environment but do not inherently include the dynamic connection to external cloud resources like community clouds.