4 ms·

Both vertical and horizontal are pretty simple with Elixir and are done in essentially the same way.

Jtsummers 3y ago
Almost every system scales simply vertically, vertical scaling is (to a first approximation) throwing faster hardware at the problem. If you're IO bound you get a faster IO bus (this is not necessarily easy to do, but if you do it the system scales to the limit of it). If you're CPU bound you get a faster CPU. And so on. Horizontal scaling is what's hard for a lot of systems, but simple with Erlang and Elixir since they are, by design, meant to support concurrent and distributed workloads. That's why I was asking if they meant horizontal and not vertical. Erlang and Elixir are not uniquely easy to scale horizontally, but they are (if you don't fight their nature and produce programs that consist of one giant execution thread) ridiculously easy to scale horizontally by tacking on additional CPU cores or physical CPUs.
- evadne 3y ago
  WhatsApp did a lot of work in this area, and I would encourage folks who are interested to seek out information related to that. 2014 - https://www.infoq.com/presentations/whatsapp-scalability/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/whatsapp-scalability/ There is also Lasp, which is very interesting: https://lasp-lang.readme.io/docs https://lasp-lang.readme.io/docs
- killthebuddha 3y ago
  I think it makes a lot of sense in theory to consider adding CPUs as horizontal scaling, but in practice I'm not sure it makes sense. Moving your app to a machine with twice as many CPUs is more like moving it to a machine with twice as much RAM than it is like doubling the number of machines your app is deployed to.
- ricketycricket 3y ago
  > Almost every system scales simply vertically, vertical scaling is (to a first approximation) throwing faster hardware at the problem. If you're IO bound you get a faster IO bus (this is not necessarily easy to do, but if you do it the system scales to the limit of it). If you're CPU bound you get a faster CPU. And so on. My interpretation was vertical scaling is within a single node and adding cores or CPUs to a single node is vertical. Multi-core and multi-node really present similar problems, so adding more cores or adding more nodes isn't terribly different from a design perspective. > ...easy to scale horizontally by tacking on additional CPU cores or physical CPUs. If you define adding more cores to a single machine is actually horizontal scaling, then we agree in principle, just not in the definition of scaling.
- sph 3y ago
  > Almost every system scales simply vertically Not true in practice. You can scale hardware easily to hundreds of cores, if your app is able to spread the load, but the performance ceiling is very low if your app is single-threaded. The BEAM with its design is very parallel, and the more cores, the happier it is.

Almost every system scales simply vertically, vertical scaling is (to a first approximation) throwing faster hardware at the problem. If you're IO bound you get a faster IO bus (this is not necessarily easy to do, but if you do it the system scales to the limit of it). If you're CPU bound you get a faster CPU. And so on. Horizontal scaling is what's hard for a lot of systems, but simple with Erlang and Elixir since they are, by design, meant to support concurrent and distributed workloads. That's why I was asking if they meant horizontal and not vertical. Erlang and Elixir are not uniquely easy to scale horizontally, but they are (if you don't fight their nature and produce programs that consist of one giant execution thread) ridiculously easy to scale horizontally by tacking on additional CPU cores or physical CPUs.

evadne 3y ago
WhatsApp did a lot of work in this area, and I would encourage folks who are interested to seek out information related to that. 2014 - https://www.infoq.com/presentations/whatsapp-scalability/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/whatsapp-scalability/ There is also Lasp, which is very interesting: https://lasp-lang.readme.io/docs https://lasp-lang.readme.io/docs
killthebuddha 3y ago
I think it makes a lot of sense in theory to consider adding CPUs as horizontal scaling, but in practice I'm not sure it makes sense. Moving your app to a machine with twice as many CPUs is more like moving it to a machine with twice as much RAM than it is like doubling the number of machines your app is deployed to.
ricketycricket 3y ago
> Almost every system scales simply vertically, vertical scaling is (to a first approximation) throwing faster hardware at the problem. If you're IO bound you get a faster IO bus (this is not necessarily easy to do, but if you do it the system scales to the limit of it). If you're CPU bound you get a faster CPU. And so on. My interpretation was vertical scaling is within a single node and adding cores or CPUs to a single node is vertical. Multi-core and multi-node really present similar problems, so adding more cores or adding more nodes isn't terribly different from a design perspective. > ...easy to scale horizontally by tacking on additional CPU cores or physical CPUs. If you define adding more cores to a single machine is actually horizontal scaling, then we agree in principle, just not in the definition of scaling.
sph 3y ago
> Almost every system scales simply vertically Not true in practice. You can scale hardware easily to hundreds of cores, if your app is able to spread the load, but the performance ceiling is very low if your app is single-threaded. The BEAM with its design is very parallel, and the more cores, the happier it is.