Vertical scaling vs Horizontal scaling
To scale up or scale-out? That is the question. When your business is growing and your applications need to expand accessibility, power, and performance, you have two options to meet the challenge — horizontal scaling and vertical scaling. This article will help you answer that question: “Should my business scale up or scale out?”
What is Scalability?
First, let’s explain what scalability is. Scalability is simply measured by the number of requests an application can handle successfully. Once the application can no longer handle any more simultaneous requests, it has reached its scalability limit.
For example, your application may be able to successfully handle X number of requests simultaneously, but as soon as your application hits X + 1 simultaneous requests, your critical hardware resources run out and your application has reached its maximum capacity.
Vertical Scaling
Vertical scaling referred to as “scale up”, means the process of adding more power(CPU, RAM, etc.) to your servers.
When traffic is low, vertical scaling is a great option, and the simplicity of vertical scaling is its main advantage. Unfortunately, it comes with serious limitations.
- Vertical scaling has a hard limit. It is impossible to add unlimited CPU and memory to a single server.
- Vertical scaling does not have failover and redundancy. If one server goes down, the website/app goes down with it completely.
Horizontal Scaling
Horizontal scaling referred to as “scale-out”, allows you to scale by adding more servers into your pool of resources.
Horizontal scaling is more desirable for large-scale applications due to the limitations of vertical scaling.
What is your horizontal scaling or vertical scaling strategy?
A scaling strategy can dynamically select changes in application capacity and scale, including vertical or horizontal scaling. Scaling strategies may include the addition or removal of a single server or a number of servers in the same data center and may include a combination of vertical, horizontal, and/or hybrid scaling strategies for different data centers.
If you want superior performance, you can easily use vertical or horizontal scaling. You can also work in the same data center — scaled vertically and horizontally, if necessary — to achieve superior performance without any problems. You do not need both vertical scaling and horizontal scaling to achieve better performance; you can scale your existing machine infrastructure, the pool of resources, or the data center either vertically or horizontally and avoid redundancy.
Depending on the company and application, you can weigh the advantages and disadvantages of horizontal and vertical scaling and determine which is best for you.
Thanks for reading :)
