As companies grow, so does the amount of teammates, resources and infrastructure needed to handle the increasing workload and user demand. With this growth, it’s fundamental to understand and analyze the action items needed to complete to guarantee excellent performance and reliability.
The ability to scale efficiently has become more important than ever. While users expect smooth and uninterrupted experiences, businesses must find a way to deliver on those expectations while managing operational costs effectively.
This blog aims to provide information on what vertical and horizontal scaling is and what strategy works best for your organization’s needs and objectives.
What Does Scaling Mean in IT?
Scaling in IT refers to the capability of a company to accommodate growth in servers, networks or applications to improve overall performance. Companies can achieve this by adding more resources to a single machine (vertical scaling) or improving performance by distributing the increasing growth and load across multiple systems (horizontal scaling).
When growth is forecasted, scaling becomes fundamental to maintain the speed and performance needed to ensure system reliability. Additionally, scaling greatly supports cost-efficiency efforts since businesses only need to pay for the resources they are using at a given time.
Discover more: Guide to Server-Side Rendering (SSR)
Scaling Up: The Vertical Approach
Vertical scaling refers to the addition of more resources to a single server. The addition can involve more CPU, RAM or storage space. The objective is to allow an existing machine to handle and process heavier workloads without changing the system’s architecture.
For instance, if a company’s system experiences more users, it might require a database server upgrade. With this upgrade, the system gets additional memory and faster processors to improve response times during peak usage.
One of the advantages of vertical scaling is that it keeps things simple. The system relies on fewer but more powerful machines. However, it does incur physical or cost limitations since there’s so much that a single server can take.
Scaling Down: The Horizontal Approach
Horizontal scaling refers to increasing a system’s capacity by adding more machines or nodes. While vertical scaling improves existing servers, horizontal scaling focuses on distributed architectures where performance and reliability are fundamental.
For example, if a system is receiving a high volume of requests, the team could deploy additional instances of a specific service to handle the growing demand. The instances would be distributed across multiple containers or virtual machines. A load balancer then routes incoming requests evenly among all instances, ensuring the system has an optimal performance.
One of the advantages of scaling horizontally is that it helps with fault tolerance and high availability. In the case a node fails, the workload of the system can be distributed across the remaining nodes without causing a complete system outage.
Key Differences between Vertical and Horizontal Scaling:
Architecture Complexity: Vertical scaling is less complex than horizontal scaling since it only involves upgrading a single server compared to a complex distributed system (microservices or load-balanced clusters).
Downtime vs high availability: Vertical scaling requires system restarts often, causing downtime, while horizontal scaling supports high availability since it distributes traffic across multiple nodes.
Cost and resource allocation: Vertical scaling can be cheaper at the beginning, but once things are scaled with time it becomes expensive. Horizontal scaling has a better resource distribution but usually requires upfront investment in infrastructure.
Scalability limits: With Horizontal scaling, nodes can be added indefinitely, but with vertical scaling, the scalability is limited to the capacity of a single machine.
Conclusion
Selecting the right scaling strategy depends on your business objectives, technical requirements, and budget constraints. Each one of these strategies presents advantages and disadvantages, the focus is on anticipating future growth to ensure processes, systems and overall performance is sustainable.
While vertical scaling is more appropriate for smaller applications, horizontal scaling works perfectly for rapidly growing systems. Looking to identify the best strategy for your system’s growth? Contact us and we’d be happy to guide you through either approach and any needs you have for Dedicated Software Teams.
