What Scalability is:

• Scalability is a desirable property of a system which indicates its ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner, or to be readily enlarged as demands increase.

What Scalability is not:

• Raw speed or performance (2GHz vs. 3GHz)
• About the operating system (Solaris vs. Linux)
• About a particular software technology (Java vs. Python vs. Rails)
• About a particular hardware platform (AMD vs. Intel)
• About optimized code (10 lines of code vs. 1000)
• About storage technology (SAN vs. NAS)

„John Engates CTO, Rackspace Presented“