Test Your Knowledge of Scaling the Modern Startup Stack with this Quiz!

Strategies for Scaling the Modern Startup Stack

• The modern application stack for early-stage startups includes a frontend hosting platform, a serverless API backend, and a serverless relational database tier.
• As traffic scales, the modern stack will eventually reach its limits and require a new approach.
• Hyper-growth startups can gradually migrate to a microservice architecture by leveraging cloud native strategies.
• Before performance issues arise, a robust operational monitoring and observability system should be in place to detect when the application starts to fall apart due to rising traffic load.
• There are many observability solutions in the market, and it is advised to buy a solution instead of building one.
• Critical performance metrics to monitor for the database tier include read and write request rate, query response time, database connections, lock contention, and slow queries.
• Critical performance metrics to monitor for the application tier include incoming request rate, response time, error rate, and network throughput.
• The database tier is likely the first place that could break as traffic grows and could overwhelm the serverless relational database.
• Strategies for scaling the database tier in the modern serverless stack remain the same as in the early days and include read replicas, sharding, and caching.
• Read replicas involve adding a series of read replicas to the primary database to handle reads.
• Sharding involves splitting the database into smaller, more manageable parts.
• Caching involves storing frequently accessed data in a cache to reduce the number of requests to the database.