Hands-On Microservices with Kotlin

Vertical scaling

When we scale an application, we can choose to increase the power of the system that it uses, adding more CPU, more memory, or disk space. Basically, we are making our server bigger. This is called vertical scaling.

Of course, we can use this to sale our architecture, but it will have some downsides:

• The scaling is fixed to a certain amount, for example, if we add more RAM it will be always there, used or not used
• We will reach a threshold where the cost of vertical scaling becomes less effective, with a high usage adding more resources to a server that already have plenty of resources to just partially increase its capacity, for example, double the CPU of a server that already has a very powerful CPU
• We can end being tied ...