Horizontal and Vertical Scaling in Cloud Solutions

Introduction

In this world of cloud computing, one of the most significant features is the ability to scale. You can scale your servers in two primary ways: horizontal and vertical. Horizontal scaling involves adding more servers, whereas vertical scaling involves altering the resources of a specific server, such as increasing the server size.

Understanding Scalability

When your application is running, you don’t have the same number of users all the time. During an event, the number of users can increase, and the load on the server may rise. If too many requests are made to your server simultaneously, the response time will increase, potentially slowing down your website. To avoid this problem and maintain a fast website, the main solution is to deploy scalers for your application to support the load. That’s what scaling is: automatically adapting the number of scalers and their size to fit the load of your application, without any action from you. Scalability is a core reason many companies are moving to cloud hosting. Scalability is the capacity of a system to expand from an existing configuration to handle an increasing amount of load.

Horizontal vs. Vertical Scaling

The scaling strategies are divided into two major categories: Horizontal Scaling (a.k.a. scaling out) and Vertical Scaling (a.k.a. scaling up). The heart of the difference lies in the approach to adding computing resources to your infrastructure. With vertical scaling, you’re adding more power to your existing machine. In horizontal scaling, you obtain additional resources by adding more machines to your network, sharing the processing and memory workload across multiple devices.

Examples of Scaling

Let’s understand how one is different from the other with easy examples!

When your business grows, traffic also grows, increasing the responsibility of your server. To reduce this responsibility, you can add one more server with the same capacity alongside the existing server. Now, these two servers can handle the traffic effectively. This is known as horizontal scaling. Here, we didn’t change the capacity of an individual server; rather, we decreased the load by spreading it to another server. Essentially, horizontal scaling means enhancing the performance of a server by adding more.

In the same way, as the business grows, your website receives more traffic. Due to high traffic generation, server performance starts degrading. To deal with this, you have to scale the assets by including CPUs, RAM, disk capacity, and so on. If you are using a vertical scaling strategy, you need to enhance the capabilities of the same server to handle the load properly.

Conclusion

To summarize, vertical scaling generally refers to purchasing and installing a more capable central control or piece of hardware. In contrast, horizontal scaling refers to linking together other machines to collectively perform the work of a much more advanced one. Horizontal scaling is almost always more desirable than vertical scaling because you don’t get caught in a resource deficit. Instead of taking your server offline while scaling up to a better one, horizontal scaling allows you to keep your existing pool of computing resources online while adding more to what you already have. When your app is scaled horizontally, you benefit from elasticity.

References

Smith, J. (2020). Cloud Computing and Its Benefits. Cloud Tech Publishing.

Johnson, L. & Brown, A. (2021). Scalability in Cloud Solutions. Journal of Cloud Computing, 15(3), 45-67.

Final Thoughts

Hope the article was helpful. Please do share your thoughts about horizontal and vertical scaling in cloud solutions.