Pystyskaloituvuus

Pystyskaloituvuus, a Finnish term, translates to "vertical scalability" in English. It refers to the ability of a system, such as a computer system or a network, to handle an increasing amount of work by adding more resources to the existing hardware. This typically involves upgrading components like the CPU, RAM, or storage within a single server. The core concept is enhancing the capacity of a single machine rather than distributing the workload across multiple machines.

When a system experiences increased demand, vertical scalability allows administrators to improve its performance by simply purchasing and installing more powerful hardware. For example, a web server experiencing a surge in traffic could be upgraded with a faster processor or more memory to accommodate the additional requests. This approach is often simpler to implement than horizontal scalability, as it doesn't require significant changes to the system's architecture or application code. However, there are physical limitations to how much a single machine can be upgraded, and eventually, a point is reached where further vertical scaling is impossible or prohibitively expensive. At this juncture, horizontal scalability might become a more viable option.