A Perfect Fifth of Notes on Scalability

Jeremiah Peschka with a great a set of Notes on Scalability, just in case you do reach your wildest expectations of success:

  1. Build it to Break. Plan for the fact that everything you make is going to break. Design in layers that are independent and redundant.
  2. Everything is a Feature. Your application is a set of features created by a series of conscious choices made by considering trade-offs.
  3. Scale Out, Not Up. Purchasing more hardware is easier than coding and managing horizontal resources.
  4. Buy More Storage. Large numbers of smaller, faster drives have more IOPS than fewer, larger drives.
  5. You’re Going to Do It Wrong. Be prepared to iterate on your ideas. You will make mistakes.  Be prepared to re-write code and to quickly move on to the next idea.

Please read the original article for a much more expansive treatment.