Horizontal Scaling

What is Horizontal Scaling?

Horizontal scaling adds more agent instances to handle increased load, contrasting with vertical scaling that upgrades existing instances with more resources. This approach provides better fault tolerance since no single instance failure impacts overall capacity, and enables near-linear scaling by simply adding instances. Stateless agent design facilitates horizontal scaling by allowing any instance to handle any request.

Effective horizontal scaling requires load balancing to distribute work evenly, session management if agents maintain state, and orchestration to automatically adjust instance count based on demand. Cloud deployments make horizontal scaling straightforward through auto-scaling groups. Challenges include coordinating shared resources like databases and managing costs when over-provisioned.

Example

How Signet addresses this

Signet's Reliability dimension values horizontal scaling as evidence of mature operational design. Agents with demonstrated auto-scaling maintaining performance during load spikes score higher in reliability than those with fixed capacity prone to overload.