Lateral Scaling

Definitions

1. Another term for horizontal scaling — increasing system capacity by adding more machines or instances to distribute load, rather than upgrading the hardware of a single machine (vertical scaling).

   In plain English: Handling more traffic by adding more computers to share the work, rather than making one computer more powerful.

   Example: "We hit the CPU ceiling on a single box, so we went with lateral scaling and added four more nodes behind the load balancer."

Related Terms

• Auto-scaling Group
• Distributed Cache
• Distributed Consensus
• Distributed Hash Table
• Distributed Lock
• Distributed Queue
• Distributed System Design
• Scale Out