Scalability, Consistency, and Performance

Abstract

Scalability, as generally defined, is the property of a system to handle a growing amount of work by adding resources to the system. In cloud platforms, where massive standardization and “economy of scale” principles are driving hardware design, the ability to just add resources to a single instance of a service may be limited. That is why, in addition to adopting scale-out architectures, an equally important aspect of scalability will be to design and tune your workload so that it can maximize resource utilization. If you are designing a brand-new application or have the chance to modify an existing one before migrating, this will also tangibly reduce your cloud bills.