What does compute instance horizontal scaling mean?

Horizontal scaling in the context of compute instances refers to the strategy of increasing capacity by adding more instances rather than upgrading the existing ones. When a demand for resources increases, instead of making a single instance more powerful (which is vertical scaling), horizontal scaling involves deploying additional instances to handle the load. This approach can result in improved performance, greater fault tolerance, and enhanced availability since the workload can be distributed across multiple instances.

In environments like Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, horizontal scaling is particularly beneficial for applications that need to handle variable amounts of traffic or demand efficiently and reliably. By adding more compute instances, organizations can ensure that their applications remain responsive and can manage increased workloads without sacrificing performance.

Thus, focusing on expanding the instance count to meet scaling demands encapsulates the idea behind horizontal scaling perfectly, which is why this choice stands out as the correct one.