How to Avoid the Top 5 Scale-Out Pitfalls

General Chicken

— 1 min read

Scale-Out is incrementally adding servers as needed to scale rather than buying larger servers. Here's the MySQL idea of what a scale-out architecture looks like:


This MySQL article lists 5 problems to avoid when scaling out:

  1. Don't Think Synchronously. Introduce asynchronous communication, parallelization, and strategies to deal with approximate or slightly outdated data.
  2. Don't Think Vertically.  Scaling by bigger machines won't work. Plan on horizontal scaling and asynchronous architectures form the start which make it easy to add capacity on demand.
  3. Don't Mix Transactions with Business Intelligence. Transactions and analytics are inherently different. Separate out different types of data onto different databases.
  4. Avoid Mixing Hot and Cold Data. Static and fast changing data are inherently different. Separate out different types of data onto different databases.
  5. Don't Forget the Power of Memory.  Make data accessible in RAM by smartly partitioning data across servers.

More information at Scale-Out & Replication Best Practices for High-Growth Businesses.

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