Cloud computing facilitates many key benefits to companies. However, the most outstanding benefit is the ability to scale the cloud platform as needed. Scalability describes the ability to handle decreasing or growing systems to achieve enterprise needs in an effective manner. Basically, scalability is an ability that is planned and can shrink or grow as required.
Before the development of cloud computing, increasing server space entailed having an expert install the hardware and then planning for maintenance, and the accompanying cost. On top of the cost of maintenance and purchase, which includes the unavoidable downtime, an enterprise was required to pay for the location where the server is stored. For organizations with minimal or no growth, this was not an issue; however, for companies that were growing quickly, the growth led to significant issues and costs that kept on increasing ( Ahmad & Andras, 2018) . When a company’s data storage faces physical constraints, it is restrict in how it can scale the physical setting to meet the enterprise demands. Through cloud platforms, a company can remove the restriction of the physical size of the server setting, enabling a firm to start small and support expansion of the company across time. As a company expands, there is no interruption with business process and the expenses remain low.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
Vertical Scaling and Horizontal Scaling
Vertical scaling is also referred to as scaling up. It means that a company diminishes or enlarges its server to enhance the capacity of its current system by including extra resources, as enabled by the capacity of the server ( Knodel, Genssler, & Spallek, 2017) . There is no code that is changed in vertical scaling. Likewise, the infrastructure remains the same. For instance, if a web application or service reaches its memory storage, network resources, or compute limit, more of whatever is required can just be added though the company will be barred by its computing power and size of server. Moreover, when re-arranging the server, a company will need to take down the application, hence maintenance is needed.
Horizontal scaling is also referred to as scaling out. This is where a company is removing or making more provisions for infrastructure and interweaving them to enable a single system ( Muchtar et al, 2018) . Since horizontal scaling entails deploying novel servers and adjusting them to work alongside each other, it is more time consuming and labor intensive than vertical scaling. Horizontal scaling needs services to work autonomously so that they can be detached discretely when the servers are being scaled out.
Horizontal scaling offers unlimited growth for applications that are configured discretely from the onset. Indeed, most cloud platform providers offer good tolls that enable companies to scale out. Both horizontal and vertical scaling offer solutions to different issues pertaining to scalability; there it is not a matter of selecting the most effective scaling technique. It is about achieving the scale that matches the demands of a business; this will likely include both forms of scaling.
Overall, scalability is one of the greatest attractions of cloud computing. It enables companies to expand and reduce their capacity as needed. This in turn enhances efficiency and reduces cist greatly. Further, it reduces the redundancy of IT processes and gives companies infinite possibilities when leveraging big data for growth.
References
Ahmad, A. A. S., & Andras, P. (2018, July). Measuring the scalability of cloud-based software services. In 2018 IEEE World Congress on Services (SERVICES) (pp. 5-6). IEEE.
Knodel, O., Genssler, P. R., & Spallek, R. G. (2017). Virtualizing reconfigurable hardware to provide scalability in cloud architectures. Reconfigurable Architectures, Tools and Applications, RECATA .
Muchtar, F., Abdullah, A. H., Wahab, M. H. A., Sahar, N. M., Ambar, R., & Hanafi, H. F. (2018, June). The Potential Use of Service-Oriented Infrastructure Framework to Enable Transparent Vertical Scalability of Cloud Computing Infrastructure. In Journal of Physics: Conference Series (Vol. 1019, No. 1, p. 012048). IOP Publishing.
