Scaling sort of sneaks up on you, doesn’t it? One day, you’re carefree, the next you start to notice something is off… Maybe it’s the crashing, or the frequent dips in performance. Could it be the new hire? It’s not DNS. Is it DNS? Scaling is a natural part of the business process, and your infrastructure will start to change completely as your userbase doubles and triples.

It’s 3 AM and you are roused out of sleep by the dull buzzing of your phone in the other room. Some sort of emergency, you conclude as you fumble with the lockscreen. There it is: an alert that the API governing user registration is acting up. When we think about the lag between time of incident and time to respond, it’s not just about how long the system went down. How long it physically takes us to respond to the problem also contributes to lost downtime.