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Scaling

Clustering and load balancing support scalability by distributing demand across multiple servers, allowing infrastructure to grow alongside client needs. Horizontal scaling adds more servers to meet demand, while vertical scaling increases the resources of existing servers.

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About this video

Scalability is a critical factor in maintaining service availability as client workloads grow. Without the ability to scale, infrastructure will eventually be unable to deliver services at the required performance and reliability levels. Clustering and load balancing provide the foundation for scalable architectures by distributing traffic and workloads across multiple servers, making it straightforward to expand capacity when demand increases. Adding new servers to an existing cluster or load balancer is all that is required to scale the environment, making this a practical and efficient approach to growth management. Servers can be held in a standby state and activated when needed, or they can be provisioned on demand and created dynamically in response to real-time traffic spikes. This model is defined as horizontal scaling, meaning capacity is expanded by increasing the number of server instances rather than enhancing any single machine. Vertical scaling, by contrast, involves upgrading the internal components of an existing server, such as its CPU, RAM, storage, or GPU, to increase its individual performance. Both approaches address scalability but operate at different levels of the infrastructure, and understanding the distinction is essential for designing systems that meet availability and performance requirements.

What you'll learn

What's covered

Scaling & Load Balancing

Key terms

Scalability
The ability of a system to handle increased load by adding resources without degrading performance.
Server
A computer or program that provides services or resources to other devices, known as clients, over a network.
Load Balancer
A device or software that distributes incoming network traffic across multiple servers to ensure availability and performance.
Availability
The assurance that systems and data are accessible and operational when needed by authorized users.
Horizontal Scaling
A scaling approach that adds more servers or instances to distribute load rather than increasing the resources of a single server.
Vertical Scaling
A scaling approach that increases the capacity of an existing server by adding more resources such as CPU, RAM, or storage.
Clustering
A configuration where multiple servers or nodes work together as a single logical system to provide high availability, load balancing, or both, so that service continues if one node fails.

Topics

Scaling Horizontal Scaling Vertical Scaling Load Balancing Clustering Server Infrastructure

Transcript

Scaling has to do with availability in the sense that as our clients grow, we need to grow with them. If we don't, then we're not going to be able to provide the services at the level that we need to provide them. Our services are not going to be available the way they need to be available. So we need to make sure things are scalable, and clustering and load balancing help us do that.

Scaling With Clusters and Load Balancers

When we use some sort of load balancer, or we use clustering, or both, in order to bring on new servers, what we can do is easily turn that into something that scales well. That is, now we just need to add new servers to the cluster or to the load balancer in order to scale up.

We could have these extra servers offline and just sitting there ready to be turned on and activated, or perhaps they're not even existent and then we create them when we have the demand for them, so they can be created on the fly.

Horizontal Versus Vertical Scaling

I will specify, we call this horizontal scaling, and it looks deceptive by my diagram here, because we're scaling up, but this is considered horizontal.

Vertical scaling means that we're taking a server and we're increasing the CPU, RAM, storage, GPU, or any one of those components, or all of those components, to make it larger, to make it bigger. That would be considered vertical scaling.

Horizontal scaling just means that we're taking that server and we're scaling more of them. So even though we're going up with my diagram right here, we're creating more servers, so this would be considered horizontal scaling.

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