Scalability Glossary

Browse 14 scalability terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

14 Scalability Terms

BFCM
Black Friday / Cyber Monday — the peak traffic period for e-commerce platforms, typically spanning the last weekend of November. For engineering teams at...
Capacity Planning
The process of estimating future resource needs such as CPU, memory, storage, throughput, and concurrency so systems can handle expected growth and peak...
Connection Limit
The maximum number of simultaneous connections a service, pool, or system is configured to allow. Connection limits protect dependencies from overload, but...
Distributed Systems
A collection of independent computers that appears to its users as a single coherent system. The fundamental challenge: partial failures, network partitions,...
Load Shedding
The deliberate rejection of a portion of incoming requests when a system is under extreme load, preserving capacity to successfully serve the remaining traffic...
NoSQL
A category of databases that don't use traditional relational tables and SQL — including document stores (MongoDB), key-value stores (Redis), column stores...
Partition
A division of a dataset, table, or topic into smaller, independent segments that can be stored, queried, or processed separately. In databases, partitions...
Performance Optimization
The iterative process of identifying bottlenecks through profiling and measurement, then applying targeted changes — such as algorithmic improvements, caching,...
Shard
A horizontal partition of a database or dataset distributed across multiple servers, where each shard holds a subset of rows determined by a sharding key.
Sharding
The strategy of horizontally partitioning data across multiple database instances, each responsible for a subset of the data, to achieve linear scalability and...
Shared Nothing Architecture
A distributed system design in which each node has its own private CPU, memory, and storage with no shared resources between nodes, eliminating contention and...
System Design
The process of defining the architecture, components, modules, interfaces, and data flows of a system to satisfy specified requirements, and a common interview...
Thundering Herd
A concurrency problem where a large number of processes or clients are simultaneously woken up or triggered by a single event, causing a massive spike in...
TiDB
A distributed SQL database designed for horizontal scaling and MySQL-compatible usage patterns.

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