We often hear that being able to scale your application is important. But why is it important? Why do we need to be able to suddenly, and without notice, scale our application to handle double, triple, or even ten times the load it is currently experiencing? Why is scaling important? In this episode, I am going to talk about four basic reasons. Four reasons why scaling is important to the success of your business. And then, what is the dynamic cloud? This is Application Scaling, on Modern Digital Applications. Links and More Information The following are links mentioned in this episode, and links to related information: Modern Digital Applications Website (https://mdacast.com (https://mdacast.com)) Lee Atchison Articles and Presentations (https://leeatchison.com (https://leeatchison.com)) Architecting for Scale, published by O’Reilly Media (https://architectingforscale.com (https://architectingforscale.com)) Why you must scale We often hear that being able to scale your application is important. But why is it important? Why do we need to be able to suddenly, and without notice, scale our application to handle double, triple, or even ten times the load it is currently experiencing? Why is scaling important? There are many reasons why our applications must scale. A growing business need is certainly one important reason. But there are other reasons why architecting your application so it can scale is important for your business. I am going to talk about four basic reasons. Four reasons why scaling is important to the success of your business. Reason #1. Support your growing business This is the first, and the most basic reason why your application has to scale. As your business grows, your application needs grow. But there is more to it than that. There are three aspects of a growing business that impact your application and require it to scale. First, is the most obvious. As you get more customers, your customer’s make more use of your applications and they need more access to your website. This requires more capacity and more growth for the IT infrastructure for your sites. But that’s not the only aspect. As your application itself grows and matures, typically you will add more and more features and capabilities to the application. Each new feature and each new capability means customers will make more use of your application. As each customer uses more of your application, the application itself has to scale. Simply by your business maturing over time, even if the size of your customer base doesn’t grow, the computation needs for your application grow and your application must scale. And finally, as your business grows and matures, and your application grows and matures, your more complex application will require more engineers to work on the application simultaneously, and they will work on more complex components. Your application might be rearchitected to be service based. It might add additional external dependencies and provisions. You will have to support more deployments and more updates. Your application and your application infrastructure will need to scale to support larger development teams and larger projects. This means you need more mature processes and procedures to scale the speed at which your larger team can improve your application. Reason #2. Handle surprise situations The second reason you need to be able to scale your application is to handle surprise situations and conditions. All businesses have their biggest days. These are the days where traffic is at the heaviest. These are days like Black Friday in retail, or the day of the Super Bowl for companies that advertise during that event, or open enrollment periods, or start of travel season. But your business may have unexpected business bumps. These are the traffic increases that occur not because of a known big event, but because of an unknown or unexpected event. When an event occurs that is favorable to your business, you...