Presentation: Tweet"It’s all a numbers game – the dirty little secret of scalable systems"

What does it really mean for a system to scale? How do we know we have built a system that scales to meet the business requirements in a cost effective manner? With ever increasing transaction and data volumes we need to take such questions a lot more seriously. It is now becoming critical for many businesses to focus in on the IT costs per user; otherwise they are not profitable. “Just throw hardware at the problem”, is getting tired and just does not wash for many organisations.

In this session we quantify what it means to design systems in a scalable and cost effective manner. Don’t worry this will not be a software accountancy session, however fixed and marginal costs will be discussed. We need to stay grounded using measurement. The session will explore the design of performance tests, profiling, and a range of techniques addressing common scalability bottlenecks.

Over the last year since moving on from LMAX, Martin has been helping many clients scale and improve the performance of their systems. One of the areas often focused on is, “How can we do better than the Disruptor?” The techniques illustrated in this session will show how dramatic improvements are still possible in concurrent programming as new approaches are unveiled.

This session is aimed at those who want to design systems secure in the knowledge that when additional capacity is required, then the business sees the economies of scale and not increased marginal cost per transaction.