Scaling the Unscalable

How do you go about scaling an application that wasn't designed for horizontal scale? There comes a point in time when you realize that meeting your customer's demands requires that you figure out how to make your product scale horizontally. And for anyone who has faced this prospect, you know that scalability is not a feature you just bolt on like another web API endpoint. If your product wasn't designed for scalability from the beginning, you are probably facing a massive architectural overhaul to get there. How do you accomplish this feat without completely rewriting the product?

Learn from a team who is in the middle of this transition right now about how to identify your gaps, prioritize your work, and even re-envision the purpose of your product to meet scalability demands. In this presentation we will review how we determined we needed to add scalability, and what type of scalability was needed. We will talk about how we determined the problem areas that most needed scale and which obstacles we face to get to where we are going. We will discuss strategies for getting the business side to buy-off on taking the next steps. Since we are in the middle, not at the end, we will also cover the things we haven't done yet and our strategy for addressing these things - including simply waiting a year or two, and why that might be a good idea. Finally, we will talk about what might be most important: How stepping back and taking a fresh look at your product from a high-scale point of view might help you make fundamental changes to how you envision your product as a scalable offering. [184]

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