Posts tagged Architecture

Why horizontal scaling increases the need for caching

Horizontally scaling a web app has become a total no-brainer in the last few years. PaaS offerings like Heroku allow you to add a “dyno” with the click of a button and container technology such as Docker has enabled the same ease to scale your your own deployment. By now it has become a standard in all mayor cloud providers such as AWS to allow you to auto-scale your app.

Given how easy it is to add another container whenever traffic increases and performance starts to take a hit, it is tempting to assume there’s no longer a need for a Memcache. In reality, quite the opposite is true: the more we scale an app horizontally, the more we need and can benefit from caching.