Chain Reactions

Learn scaling (horizontal and vertical), and see an example of chain reaction and its causes.

Scaling

The dominant architectural style today is the horizontally scaled farm of commodity hardware. Horizontal scaling means we add capacity by adding more servers. We sometimes call these farms. The alternative, vertical scaling, means building larger servers, adding core, memory, and storage to hosts.

Vertical scaling has its place, but most of our interactive workload goes to horizontally scaled farms.

Horizontal scaling

If our system scales horizontally, then we will have ...