Vertical Scaling

1. The Pattern

Make the machine bigger: more CPU cores, more memory, faster disks. The architecture does not change; the machine does.

This is the least glamorous pattern in this course. This lesson's job is to defend it. The industry's habit is to skip straight past it toward fleets and microservices. That habit wastes years.

Here is what buying a bigger machine gets you that nothing else in this module can: zero new failure modes. No statelessness overhaul, no load balancer, no cache-consistency questions across machines, no distributed anything. Your transactions still work