In this new post to his (newly WordPress-ed) blog Brandon Savage looks at a consideration most developers think of too late and when their applications are already starting to bulge around the edges - scalability. It's the first part of this series.

Before we actually get started hacking on our code, let's make sure we've got the right questions asked and answered. We're going to need some resources, the help of others in our organization, and probably some understanding of the current system structure before we're successful in our goal. Some of these questions may seem mundane, and others will be extremely important. But we must ask and receive answers to all of them, so let's get started.

The questions touch on the topics of bottleneck sources, why scalability of the application is needed and what other services are out there that could do what I need without having to roll my own.