Horizontal scaling increases a system’s capacity by adding more servers or nodes instead of upgrading a single machine. This distributed approach improves performance, reliability, and fault tolerance. It allows applications to handle higher traffic loads and scale automatically as demand grows. Horizontal scaling is a key principle of cloud-native architecture and is commonly used in microservices, containerized environments, and distributed databases.
Glossary · H
Horizontal scaling
The practice of increasing system capacity by adding more machines or servers rather than upgrading existing hardware, improving performance through distribution.
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