How to design scalable applications?

architecture scalability
Martin picture Martin · May 25, 2009 · Viewed 54.6k times · Source

How do you design/architect a scalable application? Any suggestion of books or websites that could help to understand how to scale out applications?

Thanks

Answer

Jim Ferrans picture Jim Ferrans · May 25, 2009

Over the past year I've had to come up to speed on this question for a project my company's working on, and I've found these resources extremely helpful: Todd Hoff's highscalability.com; Scalable Internet Architectures, by Theo Schlossnagle; and Building Scalable Web Sites, by Cal Henderson. Highscalability.com in particular will point you to many good presenations, tutorials, books, and papers, and is a great place to start. All of the advice is practical, and based on experience at sites like Flickr, Twitter, and Google.

BTW, scalability is not performance. A perfectly scalable system is one that has a fixed marginal cost to add additional users or capacity.

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