Scaling Your Online Business for the Holidays
While these concepts should be at the core of every architecture, they're not always easy to implement. These tasks are time consuming and, more often than not, a large engineering effort is required to optimize your whole application (especially if it wasn't designed with scalability in mind from the beginning) to meet more demanding performance requirements. Wholesale changes can sometimes be more damaging than helpful, especially given tight time constraints. Small features that weren't considered from a scalability angle can bring down your whole application in a heartbeat. And if you're preparing for a planned (and especially if you're dealing with unplanned) traffic spike, you don't have all the time in the world to bulletproof the system. Therefore, you must choose your battles. The right battle is to optimize for business needs.