Skalbara

Skalbara is a term used in Swedish information technology to describe the property of a system to scale in response to changing workload by adding resources. In English contexts it is commonly translated as scalable. The concept applies to software applications, databases, networks, and infrastructure, and is central to cloud computing and distributed systems.

Definition and scope: A skalbar system can absorb increased demand by increasing capacity (horizontal or vertical) without a drop in performance. It should also handle decreases by releasing resources to avoid waste. Scalability encompasses planning for growth in throughput, latency, and reliability as the system expands.

Characteristics: Key traits include modular architecture, stateless components, support for horizontal scaling, and often the use of microservices or service-oriented designs. Cloud-native patterns, automation and autoscaling, load balancing, data partitioning (sharding), and caching are common enablers. Monitoring and observability are essential to understand performance as the system scales.

Implementation approaches: Scalability is typically achieved through cloud platforms (IaaS, PaaS, or serverless), containerization and orchestration (such as Docker and Kubernetes), distributed databases, and event-driven messaging. Design choices often distinguish between scaling out (adding nodes) and scaling up (upgrading a single node).

Challenges: Achieving true scalability can introduce complexity, potential data consistency issues, latency considerations, and higher operational costs. Thorough testing for concurrency, failure modes, and performance under load is important.

Examples: A web API deployed across multiple instances behind a load balancer; a multi-tenant database partitioned by region; a data pipeline that automatically adds workers during peak traffic.

See also: scalability, elasticity, horizontal vs vertical scaling, distributed systems, cloud computing.