Scale is all about growth, upwards, outwards and [+]

ADRIAN BRIDGWATER

Think big. It’s a guiding principle in business and, in the Internet-age of cloud computing and globalization, it’s also a good piece of advice for technology systems architects and C-suite directors overseeing the development of their IT stacks.

Among the core IT department goals, missions and objectives is a need to create a clear channel to enable applications, data repositories, IT services and all manner of internal system mechanics and functions to scale. But scalability itself doesn’t come in a bottle as some packaged defined IT solution that any organization can simply purchase, so what does it really mean and how do we achieve it?

Scalability itself is a term applied to an application, an IT system process, an algorithmic model, a portion of data (or entire database), a technology component (such as an Application Programming Interface (API), a system agent or an orchestrator function of some kind), a software engine (such as an AI machine, or a big data analytics service), or in fact a productized piece of technology not necessarily defined as an application or service.

Scale, why worry?

Most of us (users) have gained some appreciation of scale issues when we have tried to use a website for some service or requirement that has ‘gone viral’ and crashed. Whether it be ordering Covid-19 tests, trying to get concert tickets or an attempt to gain access to our home gas supplier website during the current energy crisis, we’ve all seen systems go down.

Sometimes (in the above example) it’s a question of web services, sometimes it’s a question of the cloud backbone’s ability to connect users… and sometimes it’s something more infrastructural, such as a database overload, or an Operating System (OS) mismatch if an application has been rescaled over to a new system, but not thoroughly stress tested.

“Most people think of scalability as the ability for a system to increase capacity to meet sudden increases in demand. However, scalability is about much more than this one aspect,” explained Nelson Petracek, global CTO at enterprise data platform company Tibco.

“From a technical standpoint, scalability involves having systems (hardware or software) operate at the ‘right’ size for current or expected contexts, without pause… and without the need for sudden refactoring or rearchitecting activity, which can introduce additional risks or complexity. Scalable systems can meet the demands being asked of them, at any point in time… and they can do so in a transparent fashion. But as important as the technical elements are when it comes to scalability, so are the non-technical elements, including people and processes. Both sides must co-exist to achieve maximum value in the enterprise,” added Tibco’s Petracek.

As we scale up your applications, data and infrastructure, our approach to security will also have to cope with the scale-factor as well. As we grow an IT infrastructure to support applications and transactional increases, so our security tooling and support should scale up too. This can lead to some tough questions related to whether we are able to protect our traditional on-premises technology as well as any cloud-based solutions - and whether we can cover all aspects and potentially different types of cloud models and vendors.

“Being scalable means being secure about whether or not your cyber security strategy is flexible and can cope with change,” said Paul Baird, chief technical security officer for the UK, at cloud-based IT, security and compliance solutions company Qualys. “This means looking at several areas - for instance, can your developers make use of pre-built and approved security capabilities within the organization? Rather than developing new methods each time, providing an authentication framework that R&D can plug into, can actually help get secure software out faster. This can help them remove common security issues in their code, such as broken access control measures, code injection attempts or insecure designs.”

Additionally says Baird, scanning applications for security issues before they are deployed into production sounds simple, but doing this in a DevOps world requires huge speed and scale. Ensuring secure code is deployed into these hyper scaling environments right from the start saves time and money and removes the risk of potential downtime.