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Cloud Computing & DevOps vocabulary · Scaling and Performance

Scalability

Meaning in cloud computing & devops, with examples

/ˌskeɪləˈbɪləti/nounCore term

In cloud computing & devops, scalability means: The ability of a system to handle more users, data or traffic by adding resources, without a big drop in performance or a full redesign.

In Turkish: ölçeklenebilirlik

How it is used

A key quality in design discussions and job interviews: 'scalability issues', 'built for scalability'. The adjective is 'scalable' and the verb is 'scale'. People ask whether a design 'will scale'.

Example sentences

  1. Scalability wasn't a concern with 100 users, but at 100,000 the single database became a problem.

  2. We chose a queue-based design mainly for scalability.

Common collocations

  • improve scalability
  • scalability issues
  • horizontal scalability
  • designed for scalability
  • autoscalingAutomatically adding servers or containers when demand rises and removing them when it falls, based on rules such as CPU use or number of requests.
  • scale outTo handle more load by adding more servers, containers or instances that share the work, rather than making one machine bigger.
  • scale upTo handle more load by giving one machine more power, such as more CPU or memory, instead of adding more machines.
  • load balancerA service that receives incoming traffic and spreads it across several servers, sending requests only to the ones that are healthy.
  • bottleneckThe one slowest or most limited part of a system, such as the database or the network, that holds back the performance of everything else.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Scaling and Performance

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