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What are the scalability strategies for an infrastructure in a cloud?, I need to prepare a scalability plan document for a cybersecurity audit

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    Vertical and horizontal ?
    – user9517
    Nov 18, 2021 at 9:46
  • It depends on the cloud provider, and the resources you want to scale. Could you provide a little more context information? Nov 18, 2021 at 9:46
  • I just want to know if there is a standard or methodologies for scalability strategies Nov 18, 2021 at 10:13

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A scalability strategy is a plan with a course of action to follow when the usage pattern of your applications change.

What can you, will you need to and wat are you going to do when your application sees:

  • a (significant) decrease in the number of customers, users, employees, assets etc.

  • a (significant) increase in the number of customers, users, employees, assets etc. Are you prepared for a:

    • a slowly ramp up
    • exponential growth
    • a one-off big spike (and can you scale down again afterwards)
  • Are there limits beyond which you can't scale up or down?

Your options are specific to your current application design and deployment but the most typical strategies are :

  • do nothing - (until things break)
  • scale up (and less common opposite: scaling down) - change the size of your instance / server: add/remove CPU, memory and storage
  • scale out - change the number of servers, deploy more instances, rather than bigger instances
  • do something completely different (that suits your needs best)
  • make it somebody else's problem (offloading / outsourcing / leverage a platform or cloud solution rather than DIY)
  • a combination of the above
  • etc.

A fairly simple three tier web application: web server, application server, database server can run on the laptop of the developer or a single VPS. With more load you can get a bigger VPS (scale up) or move the database and application servers each to a dedicated VPS (scale out). Then add a load balancer and more web servers and application servers as load increases (more scale out).

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    There are also further options, i.e. the combination of vertical and horizontal scaling, e.g. AWS AutoScaling groups, where you can combine different instance sizes and types, and choose different priorities according to your specific needs. Nov 18, 2021 at 12:36

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