CODEWITHSUNDEEP
server
Mandroid
Mandroid

Reputation: 7526

Scale up vs scale out

Which of these two server scaling options is more suitable? In first look, scale out would lead to network playing a bigger role, and hence related problems like latency etc coming in. So why should I go for scale out and not scale up?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 876

Answers (3)

Darius Iko
Darius Iko

Reputation: 249

If you are renting a server in cloud services like Azure, GCP or AWS, try to scale up first when there are more capacity to scale up. Because it is simpler and cheaper (the cost is doubled but you don't have to purchase another DB services for data sync) compared to scale-out (the cost is doubled but you must have data sync which incur extra cost) and data communication between instances is slower on network compared to memory communication in one more powerful instance only.

When you have reached the upper limit of scaling up or there are no more options to scale up, then you can opt for scaling out with multiple instances and try to adjust by scaling down for each instance. But before this, you have to consider the data sync between instances.

In almost all cases, scaling up is sufficient, unless you have to handle above millions of active users concurrently like Netflix.

Upvotes: 0

Debajit Kataki
Debajit Kataki

Reputation: 11

scaling out (horizontal scaling) and scaling up (vertical scaling) depends on various factors, Scale-out is often preferred in modern cloud-native applications due to its ability to handle redundancy, elasticity, and fault tolerance better.

On the other hand, scale-up might be suitable for applications with simpler architectures, lower concurrency requirements, or stateful components that are challenging to distribute. However, it can lead to a single point of failure and limited scalability.

So I would rather say - scaling out and scaling up should be guided by your specific application needs, architecture, and performance requirements.

Upvotes: 0

mstaessen
mstaessen

Reputation: 1317

It all depends on your use case.

Scaling up can be good in the short term, but scaling up is finite, i.e. if you can no longer buy a bigger machine, you will be stuck. Also, costs will go up exponentially with bigger machines.

Scaling out is "cheap" in terms of hardware but requires a little more thought (latency and consistency to name just a few). If done right, scaling out is effectively infinite.

Scaling up can sometimes also require downtime whereas scaling out does not have that issue.

So it all depends on your scaling needs. If you need to scale super fast (traffic spikes) scaling out is very interesting. If your traffic slowly grows but remains stable, you could start with scaling up, and convert to a scaling out strategy later on.

Upvotes: 5

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