Yes, vertical scaling is still your problem. The good news is, however, that more and more frequently the need for vertical scale is shrinking.
Back in 2008, we noted that when it comes to cloud computing, vertical scalability was still your problem.
Since that time, scalability, in general, has become a must-have rather than something a business hopes to need one day. Thanks to digital transformation and the rapid pace of technical innovation across apps and devices, scalability needs to be “baked in” to each and every application architecture.
So it’s no surprise that cloud remains a significant market force. At the heart of the operational value proposition of cloud lies scalability, the very thing that’s so critical to enabling business growth in today’s digital economy. In fact, scalability has risen to dominate the top adoption drivers and benefits of cloud computing models.
But the thing is that horizontal scale — the kind cloud excels at providing — has become the norm for scalability. Emergent trends in application architectures like microservices and APIs have combined with the rise of container-based environments to provide exactly the kind of architectures that are designed to horizontally scale out to heights we could never reach using vertical scalability.
So yes, vertical scaling is still your problem. The good news is, however, that more and more frequently the need for vertical scale is shrinking as we get better and better at horizontally scaling everything in the data path.
