Embodiments for increasing resource allocations and application instances in diagonal scaling in a distributed computing environment. Resource consumption of each one of a plurality of application instances is tracked and compared to resource allocations of each one of the plurality of application instances. For each one of a plurality of resource increase operations, a resource increase operation to an associated application instance of the plurality of application instances is computed and applied, the resource increase operation being applied when a resource increase can be accommodated on a host running the associated application instance and an increase limit associated with the associated application instance for the resource has not been reached, thereby optimizing application efficiency and resource utilization in the distributed computing environment.