What tasks and challenges does vertical scaling of a system help overcome?

Vertical scaling of a system (scale-up) means increasing the resources of a single server or node: adding CPU, memory, disk space, etc.

Tasks that vertical scaling helps to solve:

• Increasing the performance of a single node to handle a larger volume of requests.
• Increasing available memory for caching and working with large data.
• Reducing delays through more powerful hardware.

Difficulties and limitations:

• There is a physical limit to increasing the resources of a single server.
• The cost of powerful equipment is significantly higher.
• The failure of one node during vertical scaling is critical, as all the load depends on it.

Vertical scaling is convenient for quickly increasing capacity without changing the architecture, but for larger systems, horizontal scaling (scale-out) is often required.