Instead of focusing on scalability, focus on productivity. Scaling is optimization, and optimization needs to be guided by profiling or generally instrumentatio

Instead of focusing on scalability, focus on productivity. Scaling is optimization, and optimization needs to be guided by profiling or generally instrumentation in production. Having good culture and a productive infrastructure, a company can rapidly scale its systems if needed. Without such productive environment, a scalable system could crumble any time. Reflecting upon my days in Netflix, I realized that we didn't build scalability from day 1. Instead, we evolved a scalable Netflix quite easily. Almost everything was a "non-event". When needed, things just appeared to have happened. That's the magic of productivity, not scalability.