What is the difference between vertical and horizontal scaling in AWS?

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When dealing with increased demand on your applications within AWS, you'll encounter two primary methods of scaling: vertical and horizontal scaling. Here's a breakdown of their differences: AWS Training in Pune
Vertical Scaling (Scaling Up):

Concept:
Vertical scaling involves increasing the resources of a single instance or server. This means adding more CPU, RAM, or storage to an existing machine.
Analogy:
Think of it as upgrading your computer's hardware to make it more powerful.
AWS Example:
In AWS, you might vertically scale an Amazon EC2 instance by changing its instance type to one with more processing power and memory.
Limitations:
There's a limit to how much you can vertically scale a single machine. Eventually, you'll reach the maximum capacity of the hardware.
Vertical scaling can often require downtime during the upgrade process.
Horizontal Scaling (Scaling Out):

Concept:
Horizontal scaling involves adding more instances or servers to your application. This distributes the load across multiple machines.
Analogy:
Think of it as adding more computers to a network to handle increased workload.
AWS Example:
In AWS, you might horizontally scale a web application by adding more EC2 instances behind a load balancer.
Advantages:
Horizontal scaling can handle very large increases in traffic.
It typically provides greater fault tolerance, as the failure of one instance doesn't bring down the entire application.
Often has less down time than vertical scaling.
Considerations:
Horizontal scaling can increase the complexity of your infrastructure.
Key Differences Summarized:

Vertical Scaling:
Increases the power of a single server.
Limitations in maximum capacity.
Can result in downtime.
Horizontal Scaling:
Increases the number of servers.
Highly scalable.
Increased complexity.
In AWS, the ideal approach often involves a combination of both vertical and horizontal scaling, depending on the specific needs of your application.