Beginner LevelSystem Design & Architecture
What is Vertical Scaling (Scale Up) vs Horizontal Scaling (Scale Out)?
❓ Interview Prompt: Compare Vertical Scaling (Scale Up) vs Horizontal Scaling (Scale Out), hardware limits, cost, availability, and stateless architecture requirements.
Evaluating server scaling paradigms:
1
Vertical Scaling (Scale Up): Adding more CPU, RAM, or SSD storage to a single server instance.
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Pros: Zero architectural changes; simple single-server setup.
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Cons: Hard hardware limit, single point of failure (SPOF), exponential cost growth.
2
Horizontal Scaling (Scale Out): Adding more server instances to a pool behind a Load Balancer.
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Pros: Infinite scaling potential, fault tolerance, cost-effective commodity hardware.
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Requirements: Requires stateless application services and centralized session storage (Redis).
Code Implementation Example
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Scaling Architecture Comparison:
[Vertical Scaling] [Horizontal Scaling]
┌───────────┐ ┌──────┐ ┌──────┐ ┌──────┐
│ 64-Core │ │ 4-Core│ │ 4-Core│ │ 4-Core│
│ 256GB RAM │ │ 8GB │ │ 8GB │ │ 8GB │
└───────────┘ └──────┘ └──────┘ └──────┘💡Vertical Scaling vs Horizontal Scaling architecture comparison.
🎯 Interview Key Takeaway
Design systems to scale horizontally using stateless server pools behind load balancers.
#System Design#Horizontal Scaling#Vertical Scaling#Scalability#Beginner
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