Shorticle 254 – Scaling your cloud resources in Azure Platform
Improved performance and Cost optimization are mutually dependent when choosing Cloud resources in designing a solution architecture. In traditional Physical server setup, this is time-consuming and costly affair as we have less options and flexibility in cost optimization once the assets are procured.
In Cloud platforms, we have facilities to scale resources with high agility but again we have to intelligently choose if we want to scale up/down or Vertically or Scale in/out or Horizontally for better operational activity and availability.
Vertical scaling is the option where we can increase the power of our instance by adding more CPU, Memory or Storage capacity but still maintaining the physical instances as is. Horizontal scaling on the other side will physically increase the number of nodes/instances dynamically. Since Cloud services are elastic in nature, we can increase/decrease services in both Horizontal/Vertical scaling options.
In Azure platform, we have facility called ‘Auto-scaling’ which helps to automate Horizontal scaling easily without manual intervention. Auto-scaling feature is available in other Cloud providers like AWS and GCP as well. Auto-scaling works on metrics based rules where an action can be set to scale in/out as per defined rule on resource threshold defined. Since instance are added/removed dynamically, there is no downtime of application and high availability is ensured. On the down side, it may be costly as compared to Vertical scaling as individual nodes/instances are getting created.
Vertical scaling has to done manually or using Azure Automation script which has certain limitations as we cannot vertically scale all resources and scaling is possible only on certain choice of hardware (VM types) and can easily hit ceiling limit of resource based on infrastructure and hence performance can be controlled. It is relatively cheaper and flexibility on resource handling is limited. Sometimes, application has to be brought down in order to vertically scale as it requires instance restart.
If you are concerned about cost, you can choose vertical scaling and typically good for Non-production services whereas if you are concerned about performance, high availability and manage cost increase manually, then you can choose Horizontal scaling and suitable for Production and Pre-production environments for better reliability of application environment.
For further read: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/platform/autoscale-overview
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