Scale Cube

In IT, we work in a very complex domain. We have to keep a lot of things in our heads at once: technologies, patterns, trade-offs, limitations.
That's why I like simple models that help me stay focused and remember technical concepts.

One such model is Scale Cube. This is the model introduced in 2009 in the book "The art of scalability" and it suggests 3 dimensions for scaling:
🔸 Horizontal scaling: duplicate similar things, clone data, add more replicas.
🔸 Functional decomposition: split application to multiple services.
🔸 Sharding: split data into subsets by region, tenant, hash, or range.

The starting point is always monolith.
The end point is near-infinite scale with all 3 dimensions implemented together (see diagram in the post).

That's it. It's very simple and powerful. If you want to scale something you have only 3 strategies to do that 😎. So you don’t need to waste time reinventing the wheel.

#architecture #engineering #scalability