Achieving scalability
There are two ways to achieve scalability: by scaling up or scaling out.
You can scale an application up by buying a bigger server or by adding more CPUs, memory, and/or storage to the existing one. The problem with scaling up is that finding the right balance of resources is extremely difficult. You might add more CPUs only to find out that you have turned memory into a bottleneck. Because of this, the law of diminishing returns kicks in fairly quickly, which causes the cost of incremental upgrades to grow exponentially. This makes scaling up a very unattractive option, when the cost-to-benefit ratio is taken into account.
Scaling out, on the other hand, implies that you can scale the application by adding more machines to ...
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