“If you want to know how to scale your website to thousands or millions of users, there are some simple lessons you must learn…from the movies! Here are but a few examples:
Star Wars: it’s great to use a reverse proxy (deflector shield) but make sure it doesn’t have an obvious flaw (like, say a poorly guarded generator on a nearby moon.) We’ll go over the benefits and tricks of “deflector shields” on the web.
Lord of the Rings, Return of the King: don’t just guard the front end (of Mordor, or your website) and let the trouble slip in from the back (through non-performant queries or perhaps a sneaky Hobbit.) Fixing query problems is hard but important work. Luckily there are many tools and techniques that can help.
The Matrix: Agent Smith demonstrates the power of horizontal scaling. So should your website. What are some guidelines for writing code that can run in a multi-server environment?
…and that’s just a preview!
Throughout, we’ll use examples from WordPress and film. In the process we’ll take a tour of the expanding universe of amazing tools you can use to scale your site. Everyone should care about scaling — and it shouldn’t be boring dammit!