Horizontal Scaling

Horizontal scaling, also known as scaling out, is a method of increasing the capacity of a system by adding more machines or nodes to the system. In horizontal scaling, additional machines are added to the system in order to share the workload and increase the system's capacity to handle more traffic or data.

For example, if a website is experiencing heavy traffic and is struggling to handle the load, horizontal scaling can be used to add more servers to the system. Each server handles a portion of the traffic, which allows the system to handle more overall traffic.

Horizontal scaling is often used in distributed computing systems, where workloads are divided and distributed across multiple machines. This approach can provide greater scalability and availability than vertical scaling (scaling up), which involves adding more resources (such as CPU, memory, or storage) to a single machine.

One advantage of horizontal scaling is that it can be more cost-effective than vertical scaling, as it allows organizations to scale their systems incrementally and only add resources as needed. Additionally, horizontal scaling can provide greater fault tolerance and resiliency, as a failure of one machine does not necessarily affect the entire system.