What is true regarding horizontal and vertical scaling in a cloud environment?

In a cloud environment, horizontal scaling refers to adding more instances to your resource pool, which directly increases the capacity of your application by distributing traffic or workload across multiple units. This is typically achieved by adding more EC2 instances, allowing for better load handling and redundancy.

When you add more EC2 instances, you can accommodate a larger amount of concurrent users or processes, enhancing performance without being limited to the capacity of a single instance. This makes horizontal scaling a preferred method for applications that require elasticity and can handle distributed workloads. The cloud environment’s nature allows for this kind of expansion to occur easily and often automatically.

In contrast, vertical scaling involves upgrading existing resources to higher-capacity instances. This means increasing the power of a single instance, which can lead to limits based on the maximum capacity of that individual instance type. It is also important to note that upgrading to a larger instance size is often constrained by the available instance types and resources in the cloud service.

Overall, understanding the distinctions between vertical and horizontal scaling is crucial for effectively designing and deploying applications in a cloud environment, allowing businesses to choose the right strategy based on their specific needs.