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Chain Reactions

Explore how chain reactions affect the stability of horizontally scaled farms in distributed systems. Understand the causes such as resource leaks and load-related crashes, and discover ways to mitigate cascading failures to maintain system uptime and fault tolerance.

Scaling

The dominant architectural style today is the horizontally scaled farm of commodity hardware. Horizontal scaling means we add capacity by adding more servers. We sometimes call these farms. The alternative, vertical scaling, means building larger servers, adding core, memory, and storage to hosts.

Vertical scaling has its place, but most of our interactive workload goes to horizontally scaled farms.

Horizontal scaling

If our system scales horizontally, then we will have load-balanced farms or clusters where each server runs the same applications. The multiplicity of machines provides us with fault tolerance through ...