Scalability and Performance Principles

Articulate the trade-offs of horizontal vs vertical scaling with specific criteria and examples

Describe load balancing strategies and their trade-offs (round-robin, least connections, consistent hashing)

Explain caching strategies (write-through, write-back, write-around) and cache invalidation approaches

Design multi-tier caching architectures (CDN, application cache, database cache)

Describe a systematic approach to identifying performance bottlenecks using key metrics

Map common performance bottlenecks to appropriate mitigation patterns

Apply rate limiting and throttling patterns to protect system resources