Home About Posts Contact Resume Talks Twitter LinkedIn Github Search Subscribe Written by Robert Greiner on June 18, 2014 5 minute read Several years ago, building performance into a software system was simple - you either increased your hardware resources (scale up) or modified your application to run more efficiently (performance tuning). Today, there's a third option: horizontal scaling (scale out). Horizontal scaling of software systems has become necessary in recent years, due to the global nature of computing and the ever-increasing performance demands on applications. In many cases, it is no longer acceptable to run a single server with a single database in a single data center adjacent to your company's headquarters. We need truly distributed environments to tackle the business challenges of today. Unfortunately, the performance benefits that horizontal s...