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Three Ways to Scale Your Apps With Render
Using blueprint specification, Render API, and dashboard
When your app is experiencing high traffic or utilization, you need to scale your service to handle that load.
Scaling can be done either vertically or horizontally — or both! Vertical scaling means making a single resource bigger or more powerful. For example, you might add more CPU or RAM to your server. Horizontal scaling means creating multiple instances of the same service. For example, you might deploy three copies of your server instead of one and then place them all behind a load balancer that handles routing the traffic to each of them. Both types of scaling can be done manually or automatically (autoscaling).
Often, companies don’t host their apps on premise on their own servers, opting instead to host them in the cloud. Render is a unified, full-stack development platform that makes it easy to host your apps, whether they be static sites, web services, or cron jobs. And, scaling with Render is a breeze. In this article, we’ll explore three ways to scale your apps with Render.
Option #1: Using the Render Dashboard
The first option is to scale your service using the Render Dashboard. Once you’ve created a web service, you can navigate to the Scaling tab to configure your scaling settings.
When autoscaling is off, you can manually scale your app up or down in the UI by specifying the number of instances. For example, you may typically only need one instance of your service, but this week you anticipate a spike in traffic due to an upcoming event. You might choose to scale your service up to three instances to handle that increased load. When the event is over, you can scale your service back down to one instance.
Manual scaling works well if you can anticipate the upcoming changes in load, but you may not always be right about how many instances you need. Guessing too high or too low may leave your service underutilized or overutilized, neither of which is ideal.
