Do you know anything about vertical and horizontal scaling?

Vertical scaling (scale-up) is the increase of resources on a single server or node: adding processors, memory, disks, etc. It allows improving performance without changing the architecture but is limited by the maximum hardware capabilities.

Horizontal scaling (scale-out) involves adding new servers or nodes to the system, distributing the load among them. It enables handling more requests and increasing fault tolerance but requires support for distribution and data synchronization.

Example: a database on a powerful single server is vertical scaling; adding replicas or sharding is horizontal scaling.