Latest Scalability Posts

Scalability is the ability of a system to handle increased load — such as more users, data, or requests — without unacceptable performance degradation. It can be achieved in two main ways: It also includes operational, cost, and development scalability — how the system, budget, and team scale with g

Modern software systems must handle rapid growth, unpredictable load, and unexpected failures — all without compromising user experience. Three key pillars define such systems:scalability,availability, andstability. Each comes with its own design patterns and trade-offs that engineers use to build r

After followingScalability for Dummies - Part 2: Database, the database can now handle massive volumes of data and high concurrency. Despite this, users may still experience slow page loads when queries fetch large amounts of data. The bottleneck is no longer the database itself but the repeated ret

Caches can exist on the client (OS or browser), on the server, or in a dedicated cache layer. Content delivery networks (CDNs) act as distributed caches to improve performance and availability. Reverse proxies and caching servers like Varnish can serve static and dynamic content directly. Web server

This 4th part of the series builds on the previous discussion inScalability for Dummies - Part 3: Cache. Imagine trying to book a popular concert ticket online. A user selects a seat, but instead of an immediate confirmation, the website asks to return in two hours when the order is processed. This

Simple, practical guide to the first and often-most-used approach to scaling: making copies of what works. No PhD required — just common sense, a few engineering patterns, and awareness of the pitfalls.By Your Friendly Engineer · Part 1 in a short series on practicalscalability. Acloneis simply anot

After implementing horizontal scaling on servers and handling thousands of concurrent requests inScalability for Dummies — Part 1: Clones, performance may still degrade over time. Applications often slow down and eventually fail due to database limitations. Even with a perfectly scaled front end, th