Scale Out
Verb · Development
Definitions
Horizontal scaling — increasing system capacity by adding more machines or instances rather than upgrading existing ones. Stateless services scale out trivially behind a load balancer; stateful systems require partitioning or replication strategies to distribute data across nodes.
In plain English: Adding more computers to handle more work, instead of making one computer more powerful.
Example: "We scale out the API tier to 20 pods during Black Friday and back down to 4 overnight — Kubernetes handles it with an HPA."
Related Terms
- Auto-scaling
- IaaS
- PaaS
- Object Storage
- Block Storage
- Distributed Cache
- Distributed Consensus
- Distributed Hash Table
- Distributed Lock
- Distributed Queue
- Distributed System Design
- Lambda Function
- Lateral Scaling
- Scale Up
- Virtual Machine
- Virtualization
- VM
- Hyperscaler
- Coreweave
- Cloud Security
- Cloud Availability Region
- Cluster
- Compute Engine
- Context Propagation
- Control Plane