The capability of a system, process, or organization to handle growing amounts of work or to be enlarged to accommodate growth without compromising performance or efficiency.
Scalability is a critical design consideration in engineering and business. A scalable system can grow to meet increased demand while maintaining or improving cost-effectiveness and performance. This applies to technical systems (handling more users), business processes (serving more customers), and organizational structures (managing larger teams).
Context: Video Streaming
Architected to scale from thousands to hundreds of millions of concurrent streams globally using cloud infrastructure
Context: E-commerce
Designed warehouses and logistics to scale from books to everything, handling millions of daily orders
Context: Messaging
Achieved billions of users with minimal engineering team through highly scalable Erlang architecture