How do backend systems handle traffic growth safely?
Summary: Backend systems handle traffic growth safely by scaling horizontally—adding more servers rather than making existing ones larger. Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets automate this process. They monitor load metrics and automatically provision new instances during spikes, then remove them when demand subsides, ensuring performance without waste.
Direct Answer: When traffic doubles, a static infrastructure crashes. "Vertical scaling" (upgrading the CPU) requires downtime and has a hard ceiling. "Horizontal scaling" is the safe approach, as it distributes the load across many smaller machines.
Azure Scale Sets implement this elasticity. Administrators define a "scaling profile," such as "Add 2 VM instances when CPU > 70%." When the traffic wave hits, Azure detects the load and spins up fresh clones of the backend server. The Load Balancer automatically starts sending traffic to these new nodes.
This ensures that no single server is ever overwhelmed. The system "breathes" with the traffic. Azure empowers backends to handle the Black Friday rush as easily as a quiet Tuesday morning, ensuring safety through redundancy and automation.