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CompTIA Security+ 3.1
TechKnowSurge Catalog Interactives Vertical or Horizontal Scaling?
InteractiveSecurityFree

Vertical or Horizontal Scaling?

Vertical or horizontal scaling? Sort each change to a service. Land five in a row.

⚑ Complete this interactive to capture a CTF flag worth 5 points.

About this interactive

Scalability is being able to grow a service without growing the team to match. When a service needs more capacity, there are two directions to go. Vertical scaling, or scaling up, makes one machine bigger: more CPU cores, more RAM, more or larger disks, a GPU, or a bigger instance size for a virtual machine. Nothing else changes; the same server does more. Horizontal scaling, or scaling out, adds more machines: more web servers behind a load balancer, more container copies, more nodes in a cluster. The work is shared among them. Either can be automated. A cloud database that moves itself to a bigger size at peak is scaling vertically on its own; an autoscaling group that starts extra instances when CPU use climbs, and stops them when demand drops, is scaling horizontally. Horizontal is the more common kind of autoscaling. To sort a card, count the servers before and after. Same number, bigger: vertical. More of them: horizontal.

What you'll learn

Aligned to

CompTIA Security+
3.1 Compare and contrast security implications of different architecture models.

Key terms

Vertical Scaling
A scaling approach that increases the capacity of an existing server by adding more resources such as CPU, RAM, or storage.
Horizontal Scaling
A scaling approach that adds more servers or instances to distribute load rather than increasing the resources of a single server.
Scalability
The ability of a system to handle increased load by adding resources without degrading performance.
Automated Scaling
The automatic addition or removal of computing resources in response to changing demand, commonly applied in horizontal scaling environments.
Load Balancer
A device or software that distributes incoming network traffic across multiple servers to ensure availability and performance.

Topics

Interactive Streak Sort

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