Overview: Modern Design Patterns for Scalability

Objective

In years past, determining how to handle the scalability of our application depended primarily on capacity planning and static resources hosted in a data center. With the rise in popularity of the cloud, more flexible options exist for managing the scalability of our application. That’s not to say that capacity planning is not needed—it’s still an important part of system architecture design.

How we implement scalability options tends to be different in the cloud, though. Where static resources once were the mainstay, we can now leverage automated scaling options, depending on how we’re hosting our application. Cloud services such as managed Kubernetes, app services, and managed storage can be individually tuned to provide minimal resource usage when not under heavy load and maximized resource usage when it’s needed most.