Scalability
Scalability can be described as the capacity of a system to handle growing volumes of service provisioning in a controlled and cost-efficient manner. In case of a BPM system, there are two major use cases where the requirement of scaling can arise.
Scaling the modeling facility, that is, the workbench
Scaling the process runtime, with which the end customers of the application interact
Scaling an application typically involves two methods:
Vertical scaling: This is achieved by adding resources to the server that is providing the service
Horizontal scaling: This is achieved by adding multiple servers to provision the same service
Vertical scaling involves less complexity of implementation as it asks for improving the hardware (usually) and configuring the application to use these resources. However, vertical scaling is often limited by the constraints put by cost and technology in building the resources. In the context of jBPM, the resources that can be added are the memory, processor...
