Vertical scalability consists of a change in hardware specifications in order to acquire more RAM, a higher storage capacity, more virtual CPUs, and any performance improvements.

The Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) has different instance types, families, and sizes, which allows for the vertical scalability of a single compute node, as shown in the following screenshot:

In the preceding screenshot, you can see how the different instance sizes scale almost directly scale with their RAM capacity (large, xlarge, 2xlarge, and so on).

The instances pertaining to the M family are designed for multipurpose scenarios; these instances have a balance between the CPU, memory, and network throughput. They are candidates for workloads as web servers, small to medium databases, development environments, and even enterprise applications.