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Scaling one service

Module 5 of the System Design Masterclass. Every lesson here is free to read, with no account.

  • 5 lessons
  • 1 h 33 min of reading
  1. 26Scale up or scale out, and why servers must be statelessTwo ways to add capacity, a bigger machine or more machines, what each one costs, and why more machines work only when no server keeps a user's data in its own memory.21 minCore
  2. 27Cheap wins first: batching, compression, doing lessBefore you add servers, remove the waste: group small jobs into one, compress text, and stop doing work that nobody needs.12 minDepth
  3. 28Load balancingWhat a load balancer does, how it picks a server, how it finds a broken server, and why the load balancer itself must not be a single point of failure.24 minCore Fast track
  4. 29Connection pools and the database connection limitWhy servers keep a small set of open links to the database, why the database allows only so many, and how to check that servers times pool size stays under the limit.24 minCore
  5. 30API gateway, reverse proxy and BFFWhat a reverse proxy, an API gateway and a backend for frontend each do, what each one costs, and when a plain load balancer is enough.12 minDepth

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