Hidden Costs of Scaling Up vs. Scaling Out
Thursday, June 25th, 2009The well-known dilemma: scale vertically (buy hardware) or scale horizontally (add machines)?
Here’s an interesting point of view from an article at Coding Horror entitled Scaling Up vs. Scaling Out: Hidden Costs
It’s fair to conclude that scaling out is only frictionless when you use open source software. Otherwise, you’re in a bit of a conundrum: scaling up means paying less for licenses and a lot more for hardware, while scaling out means paying less for the hardware, and a whole lot more for licenses.
All in all I still prefer scaling out, so you don’t have a single point of failure.