What is the primary purpose of horizontal scaling in an IT environment?

The primary purpose of horizontal scaling in an IT environment is to increase the number of workers for higher throughput. This approach involves adding more machines or instances to a system, allowing it to handle an increased workload effectively. When an application or service experiences higher demand, horizontal scaling enables it to distribute requests across multiple instances, thereby improving performance and minimizing latency.

This contrasts with vertical scaling, which focuses on enhancing the capabilities of a single machine, such as upgrading its CPU or memory. While vertical scaling can improve performance, it has limitations regarding maximum capacity. Horizontal scaling, on the other hand, offers more flexibility and capacity expansion, as you can continuously add more instances to meet growing demands.

Utilizing horizontal scaling is particularly beneficial in cloud computing environments, where resources can be provisioned and de-commissioned efficiently based on current needs, ultimately leading to better management of load and system resilience.