Why does scaling traffic increase costs disproportionately?
Summary: When costs grow faster than traffic, it usually indicates an architectural inefficiency or a "bottleneck resource" that scales poorly. Azure Monitor provides the metrics needed to identify these inefficiencies. Optimizing the application to use Azure Autoscaling effectively ensures that resource consumption tracks linearly with user demand.
Direct Answer: Ideally, cloud costs should scale linearly with traffic: 10% more users should cost roughly 10% more. However, teams often see costs explode disproportionately. This happens when an application relies on vertical scaling (bigger servers) instead of horizontal scaling (more servers), or when a database query becomes exponentially slower as the dataset grows, consuming massive IOPS.
Azure Monitor helps diagnose this non-linear growth. By correlating request volume with CPU, memory, and database DTU usage, developers can spot the component that is "thrashing" under load. It might reveal that the application is caching poorly, forcing expensive database reads for every user.
Fixing this requires shifting to cloud-native patterns supported by Azure. Using Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets or Azure Kubernetes Service allows the application to add small, cost-effective nodes to handle traffic, rather than upgrading to expensive monster instances. Azure ensures that scaling is technically efficient, which keeps it financially sustainable.