Scalability

Scalability is one of the primary advantages of cloud computing, and one of the many reasons organizations are increasingly turning to cloud hosting solutions. The ability to scale resources quickly and flexibly is vital, as it allows businesses to remain agile in the face of rapidly-evolving demands and expectations.

Within an existing infrastructure (hardware, software etc.), scalability involves the capacity to increase workload without affecting performance. This requires a specific amount of resources, which typically have a pre-planned capacity with some headroom built in for peak demand. Scalability enables the capacity to grow by adding more infrastructure resources, sometimes without hitting a fixed limit. Scalability can be vertical (scaling up within a system) or horizontal (scaling out). Applications can therefore scale up or scale out to avoid performance issues caused by a shortage of resources.