Imagine making one workshop more capable instead of opening several workshops. Vertical scaling, or scaling up, increases system performance by adding memory to existing processing resources or replacing a processor with a more powerful one. section 1.3
One stronger machine
A system may be upgraded with more memory, a faster processor, or more powerful hardware such as a supercomputer. This approach can reduce the processing time of a work unit, but it becomes difficult to increase individual processor speed and increasingly expensive to achieve smaller gains, creating a performance ceiling. section 1.3
Vertical scaling is useful to understand alongside horizontal scaling:
- Vertical scaling upgrades existing processing resources; horizontal scaling distributes the load across existing and new resources. section 1.3
- Scaling up eventually reaches hardware and cost limits, while scaling out can continue as more processing resources become available. section 1.3
- Large-scale systems increasingly favor horizontal architectures for real-time demands, high data volumes, reliability through redundancy, and cloud resource sharing. section 1.3
