Just-In-Time Scalability

At my previous company, we pioneered an approach to building out our infrastructure that we called "Just-In-Time Scalability." We wanted an agile approach that would allow us to build our software architecture as we needed it, without downtime, but also without large amounts of up-front cost. After all, the worst kind of waste in software development is code to support a use case that never materializes. Scalable systems are no exception - if your assumptions about how many customers you'll have, or how they will behave are just a little bit wrong, you can wind up with a massive amount of wasted code.

Chris and I had the opportunity to present on our approach this past spring at the MySQL Conference. You can also download our presentation, "Just-In-Time Scalability: Agile Methods to Support Massive Growth."

Update: PDF version for "lazy linux users" and others who love freedom.