Taking an Initial Approach to Scaling
Deciding when and how to approach scaling your service can be a daunting task, but it doesn't have to be. In order to effectively scale, engineers must have a solid understanding of the behavior of the system, data to support their hypothesis, and a method to test the results. We'll talk more about measuring the performance later in this series, but for now it's important to understand that most effective scaling strategies involve "Just In Time" optimizations.
It's critical to have an environment and culture which allows for production level testing via canary type deployments or synthetic testing infrastructure in place to allow for test engineers to develop load tests which closely emulate production workloads. If neither of those are available in your organization, you're effectively shooting in the dark when it comes to scaling and optimization.