Azure Tutorials Series - Scaling

Cloud services comes with a lot of advantages, one of the most important advantage of using cloud services is Scaling. If you know how scaling works, it can save you a lot of resources as well as money.

We have already covered Scaling in detailed level in the previous articles. Let's dive deep in to learn more about scaling and its advantages.

Scaling

Consider an example of Facebook, it started with its reach in one of the college, then it got scaled to the city, country and then globally. Had it been crashed after getting popular in earlier days, would it been so popular today? We would still be using Orkut or maybe any other social platform if not Facebook. That is what scaling is, if any point of the time your website has started gaining lot of traffic, you need to increase server's hardware capacity. Scaling refers to adding networks, storage, compute, bandwidth to achieve better performance.

Scaling can be of various type depending upon the requirement -

Vertical Scaling

• Scaling up  - Increasing the memory. storage or compute in the existing setup.
• Scaling down - Decreasing the memory, storage or compute in the existing setup

Horizontal Scaling

• Scaling out -  Adding up more Virtual machines to power up the application
• Scaling in - Removing extra Virtual machines from your setup

Now question is, for a new guy who just invested in Azure, how would he know when and how to scale? Well, Microsoft Azure provides couple of services which can help you manage your expenses -

• Azure Advisor
• Azure Cost Management

You can use these services to understand where you are using more than you need. Once identified, you can scale back.