An introduction to elastic scaling

For a fast-growing business, support systems are generally under pressure, and all the layers of the hardware and software systems may become bottlenecks. In serious cases, there may be problems such as high system load, response delay, or even inability to provide services, thus affecting the user experience and causing the enterprise to incur losses.

From a system perspective, this is a high availability issue. The general solution is simple and direct. The system's pressure issues that are caused by insufficient resources (for example, insufficient storage capacity) can be solved by increasing resources, while excess resources can be solved by reducing resources. This process belongs to capacity expansion and contraction – that is, elastic scaling.

There are two types of expansion and contraction schemes in the industry – vertical scaling and horizontal scaling:

• Vertical scaling can be achieved by upgrading the...