An introduction to application scaling
Scalability is the ability of a system to grow and adapt to changing conditions. It is not only about technical capacity but also about supporting the growth of the business and the organization behind it. If you are building a product expected to reach millions of users, you will face questions like: How will the system handle increasing demand without slowing down or crashing? How will it store large volumes of data and manage I/O efficiently? As your team grows, how will you organize work so different parts of the codebase can evolve independently? Even smaller projects face scalability challenges, just in different forms, and ignoring them can harm both the project and the company.
Of course, you do not need to optimize everything up front. The pragmatic path is to understand the available technical options and their trade-offs so you can decide when they are worth applying. Pragmatism is only possible with a broad knowledge of those...
