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Building Systems
That Scale
The principles we follow to build infrastructure that handles millions of events without breaking a sweat, and what we learned the hard way.
Scale Is Not Linear
Going from 1 to 100 users is trivial. Going from 10K to 100K breaks everything you thought was solid. The systems that survive are the ones designed for the load they haven't seen yet.
System Load
Fail Fast, Recover Faster
Systems will fail. The question isn't if, but when and how gracefully. Design for failure from day one.
- Circuit breakers prevent cascade failures
- Graceful degradation maintains core functionality
- Automatic recovery without manual intervention
- Health checks that actually mean something
Horizontal Over Vertical
You can only make a single server so big. Design for horizontal scaling from the start, it's easier to add nodes than to migrate architectures.
- Stateless services that can be replicated
- Shared-nothing architecture where possible
- Database sharding strategies planned early
- Load balancing with intelligent routing
Measure Everything
You can't optimize what you can't measure. Instrumentation isn't overhead, it's survival.
- Distributed tracing across all services
- Real-time metrics with meaningful alerts
- Business metrics alongside system metrics
- Performance budgets enforced in CI/CD
Async by Default
Synchronous calls are blocking calls. In a distributed system, every sync call is a potential bottleneck waiting to happen.
- Message queues for decoupled communication
- Event-driven architecture for flexibility
- Streaming for real-time data flows
- Backpressure handling to prevent overload
Simple Beats Clever
Complexity is the enemy of reliability. Every clever optimization is a future debugging nightmare.
- Clear data flows over magic abstractions
- Boring technology for critical paths
- Documentation as first-class citizen
- Code that reads like it executes
The Stack
Each layer has a job. No layer does too much.
Lessons Learned
Every outage is a teacher if you're willing to learn.
Database connections are precious
Connection pooling isn't optional. One runaway query can starve your entire system.
Timeouts everywhere
Every network call needs a timeout. No exceptions. The default should be aggressive.
Idempotency saves lives
When a request might be retried, make sure it can be. Duplicate handling is not optional.
Backups aren't backups until tested
If you haven't restored from backup, you don't have backups. You have hope.
Build for Tomorrow
The best time to think about scale is before you need it. The architecture decisions you make today will either enable or limit your growth tomorrow. Choose wisely.