Horizontal vs. Vertical Scalability
Explore the concepts of horizontal and vertical scalability in AWS and how they help manage increasing workloads efficiently. Understand key services like EC2 Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing, and learn how to choose the best scaling strategy for different application types to maintain performance and cost efficiency.
Scalability, in the cloud computing field, can be simply defined as the ability of a system to increase its workload by accommodating the growth of demand for work. AWS provides both horizontal and vertical scalability. The specific interest includes architects and developers who aim at providing assurance to them that the system developed is functional, low-cost, and capable of meeting the demand of users. This scalability ensures that applications can handle increasing loads smoothly without compromising performance or user experience.
Horizontal scalability
Horizontal scalability, sometimes called scaling out or in, adds more instances or nodes to a pool to handle increased load or remove from it. This is similar to adding new lanes to a road to carry more traffic. It’s pivotal for applications that experience variable workloads, allowing them to maintain performance during peak times without incurring the cost of idle resources during off-peak times.
In AWS, services such as Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) practically take care of the horizontal scaling for users.