I had a lot of scalability talks this week - vast majority of them were related to one huge piece of legacy application that’s about being heavily modernized (don’t ask about details, you really don’t wanna know). The most interesting thing about this app is that after the modernization it’s supposed to run on a different platform (than it was initially running on). The problem with the original platform (one of few) is that it’s not out-scalable (in other words - horizontally scalable) at all - one of the most important expectations is that the final outcome will be.
However, people have a very strange notion about that - everyone I’ve encounter asked me whether the target PLATFORM is scalable. Everyone.
My question is - since one does the platform determine that? It’s all about the application itself. It depends on:
- how it the data related and interconnected
- services being contextual or not
- caching strategies
- operations being transactional or not
- etc.
Surely, platform may be a showstopper here, but it’s the application that has to be build with out-scaling in mind.
