• What is Scalability?
  • Tech Definition #1
  • Tech Definition #2
  • Scalable SSD Cloud

The above whiteboard animation discusses numerous benefits of using SSD cloud server hosting for the hosting of your app: ease, time-to-market, freedom, affordability, cost flexibility, and scalability. Scalability is one of the most exciting features of the cloud: distributed virtual servers make the resources available to each independent system essentially limitless.

Tech writer Margaret Rouse explains this concept and how it is commonly applied to technology in her TechTarget page on the topic – entitled “scalability.”

What is Scalability?

Scalability – as a general characteristic – is continuing strong performance of a system (whether technological, organizational, or otherwise) regardless of how complex it gets or how many people are using it.

There are a couple of basic ways that the notion of scalability is used within IT, as described below.

Tech Definition #1

In some cases, scalability “is the ability of a computer application or product (hardware or software) to continue to function well when it (or its context) is changed in size or volume to meet a user need,” says Rouse. Generally speaking, the change to which the technology must adapt is an increase in the amount of data and resource use. However, that change can also be to a different setting, such as an upgraded OS.

Rouse mentions that mainframe computing author John Young uses scalability in this way when he describes an operating system that can continue delivering excellent speed and reliability when new CPUs are introduced. Similarly, fonts that are said to have scalability won’t degrade when they are expanded or shrunk.

Tech Definition #2

In other cases, Rouse notes, scalability refers to “the ability not only to function well in the rescaled situation but to actually take full advantage of it.”

In other words, if you took an application and migrated it to a more robust OS that was quicker at task-handling and allowed broader user populations, the app would be considered scalable if it could make full use of those capabilities.

It is often the case that you scale upward because developers frequently max out available resources during the initial design. Downward scaling typically means you want to achieve the same performance with tighter resources.

Scalable SSD Cloud

The above video promotes scaling within SSD cloud server hosting environments due to their limitless nature. As long as your application is cloud-ready, you can seamlessly scale it up to whatever size you need. Performance remains strong partly because the enterprise solid-state drives used for our market-leading VPS Hosting platform are up to 100 times faster than our previous storage solution.

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