There are two different types of scaling (at least when it comes to Azure):
- Scaling up: Which upgrades hardware/a tier
- Scaling out: Which adds instances of a service
Scaling up can be presented as follows:
While for comparison, scaling out is described as follows:
So, in the first scenario (scaling up), you will get a better performance from a single instance, while scaling out will allow you to parallelize your work. The use cases are different in both options and are basically dependent on the workload you are ...