Startonomics: Startup Scalability Strategies
12 Tips for Building a Scalable Startup
Since scalability is considered a non-functional requirement, it is often overlooked in the hopes of decreasing time to market. Adding scalability down the road can decrease the time to market but only after assuming significant technical debt.
Balancing performance and scalability vs. fast iteration and cost efficiency can be a significant challenge for startups. The good news is that achieving this balance is not impossible.
Here are a few tips to help you build a scalable startup.
1. Scalable startups start with the right foundation:
A scalable foundation means that as you experience growth, you can throw hardware at the problem in a cost-efficient way giving you the most bang for your buck. Scaling up can become very expensive very quickly.
2. Scalable startups choose the right language and platform:
Choosing the right development language is critical to building a scalable startup. If you choose a platform that gets the product out the door quickly but is inherently un-scalable, you have made the wrong bet.
3. Scalable startups invest in the right talent:
Also important is being able to secure the right talent. This goes hand in hand with choosing the right language. Choosing a bleeding edge platform that’s more developer friendly than product friendly can create difficulties down the road when you need to find talent to help scale it.
Hiring or seeking advice from an architect in the early days can help save significantly down the road.
4. Scalable startups worry about the right things:
When building your startup, you should worry more about the foundation than sweating over performance increases.
5. Scalable startups stay away from building synchronous coupling:
The main problem with synchronous coupling is that it makes users wait and ties up system resources that would have otherwise been released. In addition, synchronous operations require infrastructure to be scaled for peak load.
6. Scalable startups worry more about constant response time than latency:
Low latency is important but constant response time is even more important. The latter can be achieved by building a foundation that allows for horizontal growth and distribution of load.
7. Scalable startups measure utilization first and then performance
Measuring utilization of resources is crucial as it can indicate stress on a system and to what extent resources are being utilized. Measuring performance only helps in being able to speed up response time and is not a qualified measure of ability to handle additional growth.
8. Scalable startups go stateless
Maintaining state is expensive. While it is possible to build an infrastructure that can maintain state using a shared system, it is best for scalable startups to build stateless applications.
9. Scalable startups virtualize/abstract everything
Abstracting development modules helps keep things manageable. Among other things it allows developers with various skill sets to work on their own layers. For instance, by abstracting the layer that implements and manages database partitioning, you can hide the “ugly” partitioning (sharding) details from the application. This makes it easier to migrate and move logical shards within physical shards.
10. Scalable startups build using APIs
APIs are an essential part of building startups as they allow for growth opportunities. Startups that are build using APIs find it easier to scale development, deployment and open up their service.
11. Scalable startups know which shift they belong to:
Within the world of scalability, you are either a redshift startup or a blueshift startup. Redshift startups grow faster than Moore’s Law and eventually need to be scaled out. The absolute number of hardware components for redshift startups will continue to increase. Blueshift startups grow at the rate of Moore’s Law or slower and as a result, the infrastructure required for them will continue to curtail. Building an infrastructure that can scale out is suitable and highly recommended for redshift startups.
12. Scalable startups cache everything effectively
One of my favorite quotes is “the best IO is no IO,” meaning essentially that the best way to serve data is when you don’t have to hit the disk. This can be achieved easily by effectively caching everything that can benefit from it.
Since scalability is considered a non-functional requirement, it is often overlooked in the hopes of decreasing time to market. Adding scalability down the road can decrease the time to market but only after assuming significant technical debt.
Balancing performance and scalability vs. fast iteration and cost efficiency can be a significant challenge for startups. The good news is that achieving this balance is not impossible.
Here are a few tips to help you build a scalable startup.
1. Scalable startups start with the right foundation:
A scalable foundation means that as you experience growth, you can throw hardware at the problem in a cost-efficient way giving you the most bang for your buck. Scaling up can become very expensive very quickly.
2. Scalable startups choose the right language and platform:
Choosing the right development language is critical to building a scalable startup. If you choose a platform that gets the product out the door quickly but is inherently un-scalable, you have made the wrong bet.
3. Scalable startups invest in the right talent:
Also important is being able to secure the right talent. This goes hand in hand with choosing the right language. Choosing a bleeding edge platform that’s more developer friendly than product friendly can create difficulties down the road when you need to find talent to help scale it.
Hiring or seeking advice from an architect in the early days can help save significantly down the road.
4. Scalable startups worry about the right things:
When building your startup, you should worry more about the foundation than sweating over performance increases.
5. Scalable startups stay away from building synchronous coupling:
The main problem with synchronous coupling is that it makes users wait and ties up system resources that would have otherwise been released. In addition, synchronous operations require infrastructure to be scaled for peak load.
6. Scalable startups worry more about constant response time than latency:
Low latency is important but constant response time is even more important. The latter can be achieved by building a foundation that allows for horizontal growth and distribution of load.
7. Scalable startups measure utilization first and then performance
Measuring utilization of resources is crucial as it can indicate stress on a system and to what extent resources are being utilized. Measuring performance only helps in being able to speed up response time and is not a qualified measure of ability to handle additional growth.
8. Scalable startups go stateless
Maintaining state is expensive. While it is possible to build an infrastructure that can maintain state using a shared system, it is best for scalable startups to build stateless applications.
9. Scalable startups virtualize/abstract everything
Abstracting development modules helps keep things manageable. Among other things it allows developers with various skill sets to work on their own layers. For instance, by abstracting the layer that implements and manages database partitioning, you can hide the “ugly” partitioning (sharding) details from the application. This makes it easier to migrate and move logical shards within physical shards.
10. Scalable startups build using APIs
APIs are an essential part of building startups as they allow for growth opportunities. Startups that are build using APIs find it easier to scale development, deployment and open up their service.
11. Scalable startups know which shift they belong to:
Within the world of scalability, you are either a redshift startup or a blueshift startup. Redshift startups grow faster than Moore’s Law and eventually need to be scaled out. The absolute number of hardware components for redshift startups will continue to increase. Blueshift startups grow at the rate of Moore’s Law or slower and as a result, the infrastructure required for them will continue to curtail. Building an infrastructure that can scale out is suitable and highly recommended for redshift startups.
12. Scalable startups cache everything effectively
One of my favorite quotes is “the best IO is no IO,” meaning essentially that the best way to serve data is when you don’t have to hit the disk. This can be achieved easily by effectively caching everything that can benefit from it.
Labels: conference, scalability, startonomics, tip
posted by Frank at 10:29 PM
1 Comments:
really good..will remember these for a long time to come :)
Post a Comment
<< Home