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Cost (due to higher effective utilization) and single points of failure? Vertical scaling is more expensive without the benefit of failover. With modern clouds

Cost (due to higher effective utilization) and single points of failure? Vertical scaling is more expensive without the benefit of failover. With modern clouds, Horizontal scaling is cheaper with commodity hardware and gives the added benefit of failover redundancy.

wongarsu 3y ago
If you are already in one of the big 3 cloud providers, vertical scaling is more expensive, especially once you add failover. If you rent bare metal it's often the other way around. So maybe one of the core reasons for Silicon Valley's love for horizontal scaling is due to plentiful AWS credits.
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- John23832 3y ago
  Whether people use modern clouds is orthogonal to whether they choose to use vertical scaling. I can both horizontally and vertically scale in AWS. I can both horizontally and vertically scale in my home office. Horizontally scaling is just more cost efficient if you can dynamically adjust to load. Clouds enable that because they have massive reserve compute. In the startup world, there infinite compute, but finite money. It’s cost savings.
  - CaptainOfCoit 3y ago
    > In the startup world, there infinite compute, but finite money. It’s cost savings. If you're using cloud stuff like EC2 on AWS for cost savings, you're in for a bad time. It makes sense for stuff that you need to be able to dynamically scale on a whim, but once you know what kind of setup you need, it's almost always cheaper to go dedicated.
  - wongarsu 3y ago
    Bare metal, doubling the amount of RAM and using a more powerful CPU is cheaper than adding a whole server that needs space, network, its own Motherboard, case, power supplies etc. This makes vertical scaling much more cost effective (up to a point, which is currently at about 2TB RAM). At AWS's data center AWS also buys big servers. But their advantage is that they only have big servers, and then rent it out in pieces. They don't care whether they rent you 2 48 core 96GB instances or one 96 core 192GB instances. Both options run as VMs on much larger servers and take the same resources, so both are priced the same (a machine of the same category with twice the resources costs exactly twice as much). Thus there's a much smaller benefit to vertical scaling. If you compare actual prices on large-ish instance types between AWS and regular dedicated servers (rented in a DC, not doing your own thing) then AWS is very expensive. And the hopes of paying less due to better utilization somehow never pan out. AWS has lots of advantages, but price isn't one of them; and their price structure will influence the architecture you choose.
- klooney 3y ago
  AWS charges the same money per core and gig of ram, whether you get a big instance or 5 small instances. I guess their top end isn't as top end as hardware you can get in your DC, though.
- roncesvalles 3y ago
  The 21st century love for horizontal scaling is for not wanting to be locked in with IBM, because in the limit vertical scaling means buying an IBM mainframe.

wongarsu 3y ago

If you are already in one of the big 3 cloud providers, vertical scaling is more expensive, especially once you add failover. If you rent bare metal it's often the other way around. So maybe one of the core reasons for Silicon Valley's love for horizontal scaling is due to plentiful AWS credits.

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John23832 3y ago
Whether people use modern clouds is orthogonal to whether they choose to use vertical scaling. I can both horizontally and vertically scale in AWS. I can both horizontally and vertically scale in my home office. Horizontally scaling is just more cost efficient if you can dynamically adjust to load. Clouds enable that because they have massive reserve compute. In the startup world, there infinite compute, but finite money. It’s cost savings.
- CaptainOfCoit 3y ago
  > In the startup world, there infinite compute, but finite money. It’s cost savings. If you're using cloud stuff like EC2 on AWS for cost savings, you're in for a bad time. It makes sense for stuff that you need to be able to dynamically scale on a whim, but once you know what kind of setup you need, it's almost always cheaper to go dedicated.
- wongarsu 3y ago
  Bare metal, doubling the amount of RAM and using a more powerful CPU is cheaper than adding a whole server that needs space, network, its own Motherboard, case, power supplies etc. This makes vertical scaling much more cost effective (up to a point, which is currently at about 2TB RAM). At AWS's data center AWS also buys big servers. But their advantage is that they only have big servers, and then rent it out in pieces. They don't care whether they rent you 2 48 core 96GB instances or one 96 core 192GB instances. Both options run as VMs on much larger servers and take the same resources, so both are priced the same (a machine of the same category with twice the resources costs exactly twice as much). Thus there's a much smaller benefit to vertical scaling. If you compare actual prices on large-ish instance types between AWS and regular dedicated servers (rented in a DC, not doing your own thing) then AWS is very expensive. And the hopes of paying less due to better utilization somehow never pan out. AWS has lots of advantages, but price isn't one of them; and their price structure will influence the architecture you choose.
klooney 3y ago
AWS charges the same money per core and gig of ram, whether you get a big instance or 5 small instances. I guess their top end isn't as top end as hardware you can get in your DC, though.
roncesvalles 3y ago
The 21st century love for horizontal scaling is for not wanting to be locked in with IBM, because in the limit vertical scaling means buying an IBM mainframe.