Scaling Checklist
Running a backend at scale means balancing latency, throughput, and reliability.
Core Principles
- Observe before optimizing
- Cache aggressively, invalidate carefully
- Automate recovery paths
Measuring Success
Use a blend of metrics and tracing:
yaml
latency_p95: 120ms
throughput_rps: 4500
error_budget: "99.9%"Avoiding Pitfalls
Every manual runbook page is a pager incident waiting to happen.
Document failure modes, roll out changes gradually, and always test the rollback plan.
SRE workbook is a great deep dive.