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Software Engineering vocabulary · Architecture, Design Patterns and Graphics

Scalable

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

/ˈskeɪləbəl/adjectiveCommon term

In software engineering, scalable means: Able to handle more users, data or traffic by adding resources, without a complete redesign and without becoming much slower.

In Turkish: ölçeklenebilir

How it is used

Used about systems, architectures and even team processes: 'a scalable solution', 'Will this scale?' The noun is 'scalability'. 'Scale up' means using bigger machines; 'scale out' means adding more machines.

Example sentences

  1. The current setup works for 1,000 users, but it isn't scalable to a million.

  2. Scalability was the main reason we moved image processing into a queue.

Common collocations

  • highly scalable
  • scalable architecture
  • scalable solution
  • scalability issues
  • architectureThe high-level structure of a software system: its main parts, how they communicate with each other and the key technical decisions behind them.
  • microservicesAn architecture in which an application is built as many small, independent services, each with one job, that talk to each other over the network.
  • trade-offA situation where getting more of one good thing means accepting less of another, such as speed versus accuracy or simplicity versus flexibility.
  • time complexityHow the number of steps an algorithm takes grows as the size of its input grows, usually written in Big O notation.

More terms: Architecture, Design Patterns and Graphics

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