Scaling for Extreme Growth? The Data Layer is Ground Zero!

Companies must build a data strategy to manage extreme growth and scale effectively. PayPal's experience shows that managing real-time data is crucial for success, with data growing at 30% annually. To handle this growth, companies should invest in various databases, including relational and non-relational ones. The data layer plays a critical role in scaling businesses, as it manages large volumes of data and workloads that require real-time access or longer processing times. Scaling systems is both an art and a science, requiring a deep understanding of how services interact with each other and identifying the impact of failures on other areas. The economics of new memory and storage technology have changed the game, but companies must still use the right technology stack to optimize their workloads. Key dimensions of scale include in-memory or caching, memory first, and hybrid approaches. Understanding these dimensions helps organizations avoid bottlenecks and optimize hardware for specific workloads. To manage 30% data growth yearly with consistency and performance, companies should adopt a slow and steady approach to incremental change while staying agile. For global distributed applications, the database must be able to survive entire site failures and provide high performance and availability at scale.