Scalability consulting
Load modelling, stress testing and the architecture changes growth will require.
- Engagement
- Fixed-fee, scenario-based
- Typical timeline
- 3 weeks
- Starts with
- Your growth forecast and an environment we are allowed to push until it fails.
Marketing has booked a campaign that should treble traffic for a fortnight. Your platform has never been busier than an ordinary Tuesday, and the honest answer to whether it will hold is that nobody knows.
Confidence in handling the next order of magnitude.
What we build
Concrete artefacts, handed over and documented.
Growth scenarios translated from the commercial plan into requests, jobs and database writes per second
Load test results at today’s volume, at three times and at ten, run against a copy of production
The component that gives way first, the number at which it does, and what that failure looks like to a customer
A headroom plan ordered by the limits you will actually reach first, with the cost of each step
A trigger sheet: the metric and threshold at which each piece of work has to start
What changes
You know the number at which the platform stops coping, before a campaign finds it for you
Scaling work gets scheduled against thresholds rather than against panic
Sales and engineering plan from the same figure
How it runs
- Week 1
01Translate the plan
The sales forecast becomes a request rate. Most scalability arguments are two teams using different units.
- Week 2
02Load test
Realistic traffic shapes against a production-like copy, including the spike that arrives the minute an email is sent.
- Week 3
03Headroom plan
Breaking points, the order of remedies, and the triggers that say when each one becomes urgent.
Chosen per project. Named here so you can see the shape of it.
- k6
- Grafana
- OpenTelemetry
- Infracost
- AWS
Questions we get asked
Related work
Tell us the outcome, not the tooling.
Send us the situation you are in. We will tell you which discipline it belongs to, what we would do first and what it costs, including when the answer is to wait.