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Comment by adithyasrin | Hacker News Reader

I know this comes with experience but imagining how to scale or how to actually implement it is daunting. Obviously not everyone is going to have to need, but there's just so many tools and so many things to keep in mind to scale. What would you reckon is the best way to learn how to scale? Possibly one step at a time.

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Pick the most expensive servers/databases/storage and increase the number of users. Every 1-2 changes in orders of magnitude of the latter will require you to think thoroughly about how to best use resources and not explode your budget.

Also read from the highscalability blog, there's a lot of experience recorded there. See for example this transcript of an AWS presentation about a step-by-step guide to scaling: http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/1/11/a-beginners-guide-.... Of course it's done with AWS bricks but the ideas are universal

Thanks, wasn't aware of the blog. Will take a look.

Wow this is a great resource.

I found so many parallels in what I've done while scaling up. Only thing I did differently was starting with MongoDB and changing to SQL later; huh.

The way I learnt a lot myself was to run applications with little budget, e.g. running them on anaemic servers with few resources. When you have no option but to improve performance, because the alternative is too expensive, it gives you a good prod to design with it in mind.

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