Question

From a monolithic server guy point of view, how does App Platform perform horizontal scaling?

I am very new to all these cloud stuff and have always been a traditional monolithic server guy. Every project, I will get a dedicated server or 2 VPS servers, set them all up and go.

For our next project we are thinking of using Cloud Infrastructure and Digital Ocean seems to be a good choice, and part of the reason is we can’t be bothered with configuring fault tolerant servers and such.

So my questions are as follows:

  1. In the App Platform, it says no infrasturcture management required, yet it mentions about horizontal scaling, which I presume would require a load balancer. Does the App Platform comes with a load balancer installed?

  2. The App Platform horizontal scaling is only supported on the Professional tier… so what’s the point of using the basic tier?.. Isn’t horizontal scaling the reason we want to use the App Platform?

  3. Is vertical scaling only limited to max 4CPU and 16GB???


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Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
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September 5, 2021
Accepted Answer

Hello,

Very good points, I also have been working mainly with monolith applications. But for the past couple of years, I’ve been working with a few applications based on microservices architecture and Kubernetes, and usually, we try to design them so that a single instance of a service does not use more than a couple of GBs of RAM. But in case more resources are needed, in case of a burst in traffic, we just scale horizontally.

Regarding your other questions, yes, the App platform takes care of load balancing the traffic between your instances so you do not have to deploy any load balancers separately and you do not have to do any load balancing configuration.

The horizontal scaling is just one of the features of the App platform. The main benefit is that you do not have to do any server configuration, but instead you could just link your repository with the App platform and have automated deploys every time you push your code to your source control system and you don’t have to do any server configuration at all.

According to the documentation 4 dedicated CPUs and 16GB of RAM is the largest instance of a single container that you could have. And then if you expect more traffic and need more resources, you could scale horizontally.

Hope that this helps! Regards, Bobby

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