Moving beyond the “magic scaling sauce” myth

The excerpt warns that systems working today can degrade as load increases, citing user and data growth examples.

Scalability means a system’s ability to handle increased load and depends on specific workload metrics like requests per second and read/write ratios.

Scaling options include vertical scaling (stronger single machines) and shared-memory approaches, but high-end single machines can be disproportionately costly and bottlenecked.