When introducing horizontal vs vertical the lecture states terminology for horizontal is in/out and vertical is up/down. How strong a convention is that?
When discussing dynamic auto-scaling policies the lecture talks about scaling ‘up’ with them in relation to adding more instances i.e. scaling horizontally.
1 Answers
Hi Paul,
I do think there are parts in the lecture where I might use scale-out or scale-up interchangeably, but to be precise, they are different. In practice, I think lots of people do use them interchangeably but old habits die hard…
In the context of the exam and also in architecture, just know that we usually have two ways to scale…move our app to more powerful compute resources or spread the load across more compute resources. We can do both or just one or the other…
Generally, getting more computers is termed horizontal…just visualize sitting more and more old tower-style computers side by side. If I get a much powerful server, I might envision that to be a taller box..hence vertical. Present-day, this visualization doesn’t quite work given processor power and scale, form factors, rack-mounts, virtualization, etc.
–Scott
Appreciate the quick response!
And apologies for being a pedant!