Scaling your application requires you to increase the capacity of the running environment to address performance concerns. There might be different reasons to scale: either you want your application to handle more requests concurrently or you want your application to be highly available or you want to improve the performance of your running application. There are mainly 2 strategies that are used to achieve what you want.

1. Horizontal Scale (Scale Out)
2. Vertical Scale (Scale Up)

In this post, I will take you through both of the strategies and discuss the advantage and disadvantage of the same. I will also show how you can enjoy the benefits of both the worlds using App42 PaaS.

Horizontal Scale or Scale Out is to add more nodes or resources to the network of nodes that are running the application. The advantage of horizontal scaling is that load is distributed amongst each node in the network and also it provides high availability. Also, it does not require downtime as you are adding more nodes without affecting the ones that are running the application.

Vertical Scale (Scale Up)

Vertical Scale or Scale Up is to add more power(CPU, RAM, Disk) to the existing node running the application. The advantage of vertical scale is that you don’t have to manage many servers. The disadvantage is that it requires downtime as you are adding the capacity to a single running node. It is also a single point of failure if in case that single running node goes down.

How App42 PaaS benefits

App42 PaaS lets you scale your application both horizontally as well as vertically and that too without any downtime. We, at App42 PaaS, have taken the approach in which your app will not go down even in case of vertical scaling.

We take two step approach in case of vertical scale

• Scale application horizontally with new configuration
• Descale application horizontally with old configuration.

So until the new node is up and running, we don’t remove the node which can serve till then. This two step approach (vertical scale by horizontal scale implicitly) has been a great value for our customers.

Go through the below post to know about How to Scale Horizontally and Vertically with App42 PaaS.

http://blogs.shephertz.com/2014/02/04/scaling-your-application-on-app42-paas/

If you have any questions or need any further assistance, please feel free to write us at support@shephertz.com