the.com/scalability
The art of your system not dying the moment people start liking it.
means The capacity of a system, business, or process to handle growing amounts of work by expanding smoothly rather than buckling under new demand.
from Built from 'scale,' as in a graduated measuring instrument — ultimately from Latin 'scala,' meaning ladder or staircase. The verb 'to scale' came to mean climbing or adjusting by degrees, and by the mid-20th century engineers and economists bent it into 'scalable' to describe systems that could grow step by step without collapsing. 'Scalability' followed as the abstract noun, becoming especially beloved in software and startup circles, where it quietly separates the companies that survive success from the ones crushed by it.
- the irony
- most systems die from success, not failure
- premature scaling
- optimizing for a million users you don't have
- real test
- 10x traffic, same code, no 3am panic
- dirty secret
- often just means spending more money cleverly