Which term describes increasing the capabilities of the VM to meet demand by upgrading its resources?

• A. Horizontal scaling
• B. Auto-scaling
• C. Elasticity
• D. Vertical scaling

Answer: (D)

Increasing the capabilities of the VM by upgrading the resources assigned to that same instance is vertical scaling (scale up). This focuses on enhancing a single machine’s capacity—more CPU, RAM, or storage—without creating additional instances. If you were to add more VMs to handle the load, that would be horizontal scaling (scale out). Auto-scaling describes automatically adding or removing instances based on demand, which is about provisioning multiple machines rather than upgrading one. Elasticity is the broad ability of the system to adjust resources in response to demand, and it can encompass both vertical and horizontal scaling, but it’s not the specific action of upgrading a single VM’s resources.