Vertical Scaling

The Pattern

Make the machine bigger: more CPU cores, more memory, faster disks. The architecture doesn't change; the box does.

The bigger truck. It's the least glamorous pattern in this course, and this lesson's job is to defend it, because the industry's reflex is to skip straight past it toward fleets and microservices, and that reflex wastes years.

Here's what buying a bigger box 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