Elastic capacity management of remote physical layer (R-PHY) nodes with a cloud Cable Modem Termination System (cCMTS) may be provided. First, a cCMTS instance may be spawned by an orchestrator. Next, the cCMTS instance may be synchronized with states of a physical Cable Modem Termination System (pCMTS). Underlay routing may then be configured between a plurality of remote physical layer (R-PHY) nodes and the cCMTS instance. Then a plurality of R-PHY node connections respectively corresponding to the plurality of R-PHY nodes may be switched from the pCMTS to the cCMTS instance.