One of the basic questions when planning a new business is:
“If I choose to, how do I scale it up? And what will it take to scale it up?”
I ask exactly the same question when planning a new software system or when I take an existing system into my hands – “What’s the scalability of this?”
There are actually 3 parts to scaling a software.
The Code
The code must be written in a way that allows it to be scaled up.
This is important.
There are applications that are super hard to scale up – because of the way they have been engineered and written.
If the code follows a few scalability principles – which are a completely separate topic – you’re most likely good to go and the code is ready to be scaled up.
Then we have another level…
The Cloud Infrastructure
“Is the cloud infrastructure – the servers, the databases and any other resources set up in a way to be easily scaled up?”
There are many ways to achieve high-scalability, but my favorite one is through having a Kubernetes cluster.
Kubernetes is a system that allows you to easily create new nodes (virtual servers) to run various services on them – APIs, frontends – you name it.
However, it is absolutely NOT easy to set up the first time and it requires a level of expertise for this.
But once it is done, you can easily tell the system to create new nodes to add additional capacity – or to remove some nodes to scale down.
There’s much more to Kubernetes and I don’t wanna go down this rabbit hole yet…
There are companies and systems I would advise to go this route…
But there are also companies and systems I would advise against putting on Kubernetes – because there are easier solutions for these cases.
The third level to consider when thinking about scaling up is the one ALMOST NOBODY talks about.
And I get it…
Most experts in the industry focus only on the technology, but there’s one more level that is super important.
The Business Itself
Yep, you heard it right!
The reason why almost nobody talks about this, is that many tech guys who talk about software scaling are actually not business owners or leaders.
They’re technicians.
They don’t see the big picture of a business.
However, I see this level as the most important one on the business level.
You can have an application, that is written in a scalable way. Check.
You can also have a cloud infrastructure set up that allows your team to easily scale the application up and down… Check…
But if your business is NOT READY for that bigger scale, you’re in big trouble.
Why’s that?
Well because if you scale the application up – for the reason you want to serve more clients…
And you get more clients…
You better make sure your business processes – I mean internal processes – are solid and polished…
I’ve seen so many companies scaling the application up, ramping up ads budget – only to fail to provide great customer service to the point where complaints and negative feedback started to fly into the office.
If you scale up inefficient or chaotic processes – you scale up inefficiency and chaos.
Think hiring 5 new developers to work on a new software without any rules. Chaos.
Or having a buggy software with randomly appearing bugs… and onboarding new clients into this leaky bucket…
You can be pretty sure something’s gonna break and they gonna call your support line.
If you scale up efficient and systematic processes – you scale up efficiency in an orderly fashion.
There’s more to scaling up business – like having the team ready for this and having the capacity to handle the load, having enough cash in the bank and solid tracking not only for financials, but also for other important processes, just to name a few…
If you can check all 3 layers, you should be able to start scaling up…
However, there are limits…
The business as a backbone must support that kind of scale you want to achieve.
Even if you could scale your application up to heavens, the business must have the ability to support it.
If you wanna discuss scalability of your application, apply for a free call or shoot me a message and we’ll take it from there…