Scalability Rules: 50 Principles for Scaling Web Sites

3. Design to Scale Out Horizontally

Within our practice, we often tell clients that “Scaling up is failing up.” What does that mean? In our minds, it’s pretty clear: We believe that within hyper growth environments it is critical that companies plan to scale in a horizontal fashion through the segmentation of workloads. The practice or implementation of that segmentation often looks like one of the approaches we described in Chapter 2, “Distribute Your Work.” When hyper growth companies do not scale out, their only option is to buy bigger and faster systems. When they hit the limitation of the fastest and biggest system provided by the most costly provider of the system in question they are in big trouble. Ultimately, this is what hurt eBay in ...