How Businesses Use Virtual Machine Instances to Scale Their Applications

By Q1 2024, 92% of large businesses were using some form of virtualisation infrastructure, and virtual machine deployment increased by 24% from 2022 to 2024 (Market Growth Reports). Leading the way are hypervisor-based virtualisation technologies, accounting for nearly 87% of all virtual machine instances (VMIs) (Market Growth Reports).

The ability to scale applications effectively is causing more businesses to invest heavily in virtual machine instances, and the results exceed any technology previously available.

Below, we'll explore what virtual machine instances are and how businesses use them to scale their applications.

What Are Virtual Machine Instances?

Virtual machine instances (VMIs) are essentially virtual machines that run in a cloud computing environment. They generate a flexible and scalable infrastructure that many businesses are using for:

• Website hosting

• Web applications

• Enterprise applications

• Database hosting

And so much more. Using the virtualised environment to replicate physical hardware, businesses have so much more freedom and flexibility. Most VMIs are managed by a hypervisor or shared physical hardware such as CPUs, memory, storage, and network interfaces. With that, businesses can run their own operating systems and applications in isolation.

Virtual Machine Instances for Application Scalability

There are multiple ways businesses can use VMIs for application scalability:

Horizontal scaling

Horizontal scaling is increasing capacity by adding more machines or units of the same type to handle increased demand. Businesses then distribute their workload across them.

So, if user traffic spikes, businesses have the option to use multiple VMIs for load sharing. The individual instances run an application copy behind a load balancer to create an even distribution of incoming requests.

When the demand drops, the instances can be automatically terminated using autoscaling tools.

Vertical scaling

Virtual scaling is the process of increasing the capacity of existing infrastructure by adding more resources, such as CPU, RAM, or storage, to a single machine or system to handle greater workloads.

Business demand doesn't necessarily need more servers, simply the ones in place to be stronger. 

Adding more CPU cores, RAM, or storage to an existing instance is more ideal for database servers or analytics systems.

Load balancing and high availability

One of the biggest benefits of VMIs is their availability through load balancing. Most VMI providers guarantee availability more than 99.99% of the time.

Working together under a load balancer, VMIs can almost always guarantee this level of availability. Through this, if one instance fails, another automatically takes its place. It's the perfect prevention of single-point failures.

Cost Optimisation

Some cloud providers of VMIs offer business savings of up to 72%. There's no need to scale resources based on usage metrics – they're a far more flexible and inclusive package. A lot of VMI providers also let businesses set autoscaling rules. So, for example, a rule could say, 'Add two instances if CPU utilisation exceeds 70% for 10 minutes.' The result is flexibility without overspending where it isn't necessary.

Most companies mix on-demand, reserved, and spot instances to balance cost and reliability.

Finally, businesses have a flexible and scalable infrastructure for hosting applications. It's efficient, reliable, and the future of application hosting. VMs give companies the power to adapt instantly to change—and that’s the real foundation of digital scalability.