Module Title: dgt_sre08 – Scaling infrastructures
Description:
“dgt_sre08 – Scaling Infrastructure” is a module for Site Reliability Engineers SREs who work on scaling infrastructure, systems, and applications in production environments. It combines theory and practice and covers the design of both manual and automated scaling strategies that respond to varying workload demands.
The design work is yours; the execution is the machine’s. Once you understand capacity, bottlenecks and the trade-offs between scaling up and scaling out, you state your intent in natural language (“keep p95 latency under 300 ms with between 3 and 20 replicas, and never scale on memory alone”) and let the machine write the autoscaling policy, run the load test and collect the metrics. You then read what it configured, compare the test results with your capacity model, and tell it what to adjust.
Module Objectives:
- Understand Scalability Fundamentals: Understand scalability principles and why they matter in modern IT infrastructure.
- Design Manual Scaling Strategies: Learn how to design scalable systems by reasoning about capacity planning, resource allocation and bottleneck identification.
- Specify and Verify Automated Scaling: Learn how contemporary automated scaling techniques work, so you can instruct the machine to implement them and verify that they manage the workload as intended.
- Explore Horizontal vs. Vertical Scaling: Differentiate between horizontal and vertical scaling methods and understand when to apply each strategy for optimal performance.
- Analyze Load Testing and Monitoring Results: Direct the machine to run load tests and gather monitoring data, then interpret the results to plan infrastructure scalability proactively.
- Case Studies and Real-World Scenarios: Study case studies that illustrate scaling implementations in production environments.
- Best Practices and Pitfalls: Discuss best practices in scalable design and common pitfalls to avoid when scaling systems, including those that typically appear in machine-generated configurations.
Module Contents:
- Introduction to Scalability
- Core concepts of scalability
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Importance of scalable infrastructure
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Manual Scaling Strategies
- Capacity planning methodologies
- Resource management techniques
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Techniques for bottleneck resolution
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Automated Scaling Solutions
- Overview of automation tools and platforms
- Auto-scaling with cloud services, implemented by the machine from your specifications
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Integration with CI/CD pipelines for scaling without service interruption
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Horizontal vs. Vertical Scaling
- Detailed exploration of both approaches
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Use cases and decision-making frameworks
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Load Testing and Monitoring
- Key monitoring tools and metrics
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Load testing procedures, why they matter and how to judge the results the machine reports
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Real-World Case Studies
- Analysis of successful scaling projects
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Lessons learned from scalability challenges
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Best Practices in Scalable Design
- Frameworks for developing scalable systems
- Avoiding common scalability pitfalls
Target Audience:
This module is intended for Site Reliability Engineers, DevOps professionals, system architects and IT managers who work on scaling infrastructure, whether new to the concept of scalability or already experienced. It includes practical work in guiding the machine through real scaling tasks.
Module Outcome:
Upon completion, participants will have the theoretical knowledge needed to design scalable infrastructure and the practical ability to have it implemented in natural language, checking every policy and every test result. They will be able to plan scaling for production environments whose demands change over time.
The students can push their exercises to the Academy DevOps & SRE Git project. For this module, create a folder with your username as its name in the following subfolder: https://github.com/Garanti-Del-Talento/gdt_academy