Scalability Worst Practices
Brian Zimmer, architect at travel startup Yapta, highlights some worst practices jeopardizing the growth and scalability of a system:
* The Golden Hammer. Forcing a particular technology to work in ways it was not intended is sometimes counter-productive. Using a database to store key-value pairs is one example. Another example is using threads to program for concurrency.
* Resource Abuse. Manage the availability of shared resources because when they fail, by definition, their failure is experienced pervasively rather than in isolation. For example, connection management to the database through a thread pool.
* Big Ball of Mud. Failure to manage dependencies inhibits agility and scalability.
* Everything or Something. In both code and application dependency management, the worst practice is not understanding the relationships and formulating a model to facilitate their management. Failure to enforce diligent control is a contributing scalability inhibiter.
* Forgetting to check the time. To properly scale a system it is imperative to manage the time alloted for requests to be handled.
* Hero Pattern. One popular solution to the operation issue is a Hero who can and often will manage the bulk of the operational needs. For a large system of many components this approach does not scale, yet it is one of the most frequently-deployed solutions.
* Not automating. A system too dependent on human intervention, frequently the result of having a Hero, is dangerously exposed to issues of reproducibility and hit-by-a-bus syndrome.
* Monitoring. Monitoring, like testing, is often one of the first items sacrificed when time is tight.
