Complication Is the Enemy of Scalability

As you design solutions, keep in mind that as complexity within the system increases, so too does the difficulty of maintaining the underlying code, as well as the overhead associated with the complex code. Further, as an application’s complexity increases, the application’s ability to scale normally decreases. When a solution begins to become complex, it is worth stopping to take time to evaluate the solution and your current design. Often, complexity occurs because a solution is trying to handle every possible condition—some of which may never occur. If you design the solution for the common conditions (the 80/20 rule) in a simple way, your code will be easier to modify the future, perhaps to support horizontal scaling.