Building Scalable Systems: Lessons from Real Projects
Building Scalable Backends in 2025: A Practical Guide Building a backend for 100 users is straightforward. But what happens when you need to handle 100,000 or even 1 million users? Here are the essential lessons for building scalable systems in 2025. Why Scalability Matters The global volume of data is predicted to reach 175 zettabytes by 2025, putting enormous pressure on backend systems. Planning for scale from day one isn't optional anymore—it's essential for any serious application. Database: Your Foundation Smart Database Design Indexing Strategy: Create indexes on frequently queried columns Use composite indexes for multi-column searches Monitor and remove unused indexes regularly Balance read performance with write speed Horizontal Scaling with Sharding: Companies like Uber, Shopify, Slack, and Cash App all use sharding with Vitess and MySQL to scale their massive databases. Sharding distributes your data across multiple servers, allowing each to handle a portion o...