The Many Faces of Scaling
Tags: scale, devops, microservices
Published: 2019-11-07 22:33:10

You can scale things other than just servers. I used my engineering blog search engine [FullJoin.io](https://fulljoin.io) to find blog posts on how companies scaled their processes, data centers, and yes - servers.

[1\. Airbnb - Used caching to buy time to fix their architecture issues](https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/scaling-with-cacheobservers-5a87dac185e4)
Key take away: If you hit a wall with the load that your databases can handle, lots of caching can give you breathing room until you can rearchitect your app for increased traffic.

[2\. The New York Times - Tips for scaling an engineering team](https://open.nytimes.com/growing-a-successful-and-collaborative-team-4e4c608ab2fc)
Interesting tidbit: They used pair programming as a way of transmitting the cultural values of their team to new hires.

[3\. Coinbase - Scaling the deployment process as they added more services and engineers](https://blog.coinbase.com/scaling-developer-productivity-d23ce491f869)
Interesting tidbit: They went from deploying 128 times per year to 580\. Investing in the deployment process made it safer and less scary to do for new engineers.

[4\. Facebook - Created a second data center on the east coast to lower latency](https://engineering.fb.com/core-data/scaling-out/)
Key takeway: When you're at Facebook scale, you can't just spin up a few extra AWS servers. It's more cost effective to create your own data center.

[5\. Dropbox - Migrating from S3 to their own exabyte sized data center (series)](https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/03/magic-pocket-infrastructure/)
Key takeway: Similar to Facebook, they had the scale to need their own datacenter, but they continued using AWS where it made sense.

[6\. Jet - Different ways of scaling microservices](https://medium.com/jettech/scaling-microservices-jet-com-4a5bf0eaad92)
Key takeway: There are different ways at varying levels of the stack to tune microservice performance.

[7\. Intercom - Interview with VP of engineering on scaling the engineering team](https://www.intercom.com/blog/podcasts/intercoms-darragh-curran-scaling-engineering/)
Interesting tidbit: Intercom hires for potential, since they're growing so fast and they need to hire people who can adapt to future challenges.

[8\. Cockroach Labs - How the hiring process scaled the company from 56 to 117](https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/creating-a-fair-hiring-process/)
Interesting tidbit: To avoid being biased by someone's background, the engineers at Cockroach Labs don't look at resumes.

[9\. LinkedIn - Sending 2.75 gigabytes of data over Kafka](https://engineering.linkedin.com/kafka/running-kafka-scale)
Interesting tidbit: Having core Kafka committers on the team has let LinkedIn push their Kafka infrastructure to the limit, while stilling keeping things maintainable.

[10\. Pinterest - Autoscaling servers during peak hours](https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/auto-scaling-pinterest-df1d2beb4d64)
Key takeaway: Sometimes something from your cloud platform doesn't work exactly how you need it to, so you need to supplement it with something built in-house.

[11\. Slack - Adding Kafka to their Redis job queue system to prevent downtime](https://slack.engineering/scaling-slacks-job-queue-687222e9d100)
Key takeaway: Sometimes when you hit scaling problems, rather than rearchitect your whole system, you can add a component that stabilizes the system.