Horizontal scaling: what it is and some advantages

On many occasions we have read or heard of all the benefits of cloud services can contribute to companies in the IT sector. Nowadays, it would even be strange not to have some asset hosted on virtual servers or to take advantage of everything that the cloud offers us, from security, availability or cost reduction.

Within these advantages, cloud services also offer the ability to grow according to the needs of the business. With this we refer to the Scalability, that is, the power that software has to adapt to the performance of companies' workloads. Let's delve deeper into this term and learn about its advantages.

You too can make the leap to the cloud! We invite you to download our free Ebook «How to migrate to Amazon Web Services?«

What is horizontal scaling?

Let's start by saying what it is One of the most powerful models when talking about growth in the cloud. It is a system that relies, first of all, on a main server and several other servers (nodes.) that function as one as a network (clusters). This allows the quality of these servers to maintain their uptimes. availability y performance despite the increase in users.

Horizontal scaling is a great help when it comes to manage high volumes of traffic by connecting multiple instances of software or hardware running a copy of your software to meet the demand for requests.

Advantages of this model

There are several advantages of this model that go hand in hand with the aspect of availability times and power. Let's look at some of them:

Scale according to resource demand and business needs: The growth of this system is practically infinite since you decide when your infrastructure will grow or decrease. Cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services They have an automatic scaling model (AWS Auto-scaling service) and without the need to make large investments in servers.
High availability times: As we already said, one of the great advantages of horizontal scaling is that if one of the nodes fails, the others will continue with the assigned tasks and it offers more time to detect if the system is at a critical point.
Easy support and setup: The cloud provider will be responsible for deploying any solution and determining when it is necessary to scale or deactivate users. This quality is very helpful for companies that do not have an IT department.

As with any cloud infrastructure, our horizontal scaling system also requires maintenance and monitoringHowever, cloud providers already implement applications to do this job efficiently and automatically, using metrics that allow scaling at the right time.

Download free ebook