AZ-900 Practice Question 13: Vertical Scaling
Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) · Test 2 · question 3 of 10
A nightly reporting job runs on one virtual machine and finishes too slowly. Because the job is single-threaded, running extra copies of it would not help, so the engineers move the VM to a size with faster CPUs and more RAM. Which concept describes what they did?
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Answer:
Vertical scaling is about increasing or decreasing the capabilities of a resource, adding CPU or RAM to a virtual machine to scale up, or lowering those specifications to scale down. Changing the VM to a larger size is the textbook example, and it is the only kind of scaling that helps a workload that cannot be spread over more instances.
Option B, horizontal scaling, is adding or subtracting the *number* of resources, more VMs or containers scaled out, fewer scaled in. The stem rules it out explicitly because the job is single-threaded. Option C, load balancing, distributes incoming requests across several instances; with one instance and one long-running job there is nothing to distribute. Option D, high availability, is about keeping a service reachable despite disruptions and is measured in uptime and SLAs, not in how fast a job completes.
Reference: Describe the benefits of high availability and scalability in the cloud