Insights for Scaling

Scaling software services is mostly an infrastructure-side venture. Load balancers and ops nodes and such... but does your actual software architecture prevent this from happening? It absolutely can. Let's explore some of the subtle yet critically important "gotchyas" that tend to come up from the software end, while trying to scale the service end...

Scaling is often assumed to be a horizontal game... that is, increasing the number of applications that handle the load. However, not all types of services scale horizontally, and vertical scaling (adding more computing to existing services) has its own set of trials... let's take a dive into the two types of scaling and what\when\where…