All enterprises desire their business to grow and most times, this means that IT environments need to scale up to deal with increased demand. In an environment where the servers are built in a non-standard manner, scaling up an environment becomes more of a challenge. 

For example, if scaling horizontally (adding more identical servers to an existing service), the new servers should all have the same configuration as the existing ones. Without standards, the first step is to work out how the initial set of servers was built and then to clone this and make the necessary changes to produce more unique servers.

This process is somewhat cumbersome whereas, with a standardized environment, the investigative step is completely unnecessary, and horizontal scaling becomes a predictable, repeatable, business-as-usual task. It also ensures greater reliability as there should be no unintended results from the new servers in the case that a non-standard configuration item was missed. Human beings are incredible, intelligent beings capable of sending a man to the moon, and yet they are equally capable of overlooking a single line in a configuration file. The idea of standardization is to mitigate this risk, and hence make it quick and efficient to scale an environment either up or out using a well-thought-out operating system template, the concept of which we will explore as we proceed through this chapter.