Going from a minimum viable product to thousands of daily active users is the dream (and sometimes nightmare) of every startup.
I remember exactly the day our launch campaign collapsed. We had worked for months developing a new feature, with an innovative product, a well-oiled growth strategy, and a small but committed team. But when it came time to scale… we had no way.
An Expensive Mistake: Scaling Before Knowing How
At that time —I’m talking about almost 15 years ago— we weren’t using the cloud like today. To launch, we had to sign a physical infrastructure contract for two years. A full week passed between making the request and having the servers available. Expensive, slow, and completely inflexible.
The result was predictable: the campaign traffic exceeded everything we had tested. The site went down, complaint emails kept coming in, and worst of all: we were stuck with the infrastructure locked in for two years, even though we barely needed 10% of its average capacity.
That experience shaped my vision of architecture forever.
The Cloud: Speed, Efficiency, and Freedom
Over time, and with several projects under my belt (including one that scaled to more than 200,000 connected devices), I learned to see infrastructure as something alive, adaptable, and replicable with one click.
I’ve worked extensively with AWS and GCP, and while each has its particularities, both allow achieving what obsesses me most: scaling without paying upfront, without friction, and without blocking innovation.
Lessons I Learned (the Hard Way) About Scalability
1. Scaling ≠ Complicating
Often, we fall into the trap of thinking scaling implies microservices, clusters, service mesh, and 15 more tools. But the reality is that most products scale well being simple if the base architecture is well thought out.
Start with the minimum necessary. And let complexity come from the business, not the stack.
2. Serverless is the New MVP
Today, launching a product without having to provision servers, load balancers, or even databases is perfectly viable.
- In AWS, Lambda + API Gateway + DynamoDB is a trio I’ve used dozens of times with great success.
- In GCP, Cloud Run + Firestore gives you fast response times and billing by actual execution seconds.
Both have allowed me to launch tests, prototypes, and products in hours, with costs under 5 USD/month.
Some Concrete Strategies I Use in Every Project
Event-Driven Architecture
Using EventBridge, Pub/Sub, SNS/SQS, Kinesis, or Pulsar allows decoupling components. You can launch heavy tasks in the background without blocking the user experience, and scale those consumers independently.
Observability from Day Zero
No matter how small the app: logging, measuring, and alerting is essential.
- CloudWatch or Stackdriver for basic metrics
- OpenTelemetry if the system is more complex
- Business dashboards in parallel: “Is this technical metric helping the user?”
Obsessive Cost Control
- Automatic scripts to shut down environments outside business hours
- Environment estimates from design
- Log analysis to detect “noisy” functions
Infrastructure as Code + Replicable Environments
With CDK, Terraform, or Pulumi, you can spin up an exact replica of a production environment in minutes. This has saved me in demos, intensive testing, and incident recovery.
Comparison: AWS vs GCP from My Experience
| Factor | AWS | GCP |
|---|---|---|
| Serverless Ecosystem | Very mature (Lambda, Step Functions) | Simpler to enter (Cloud Run, Firestore) |
| ML/AI Tools | Broad, but requires learning curve | Vertex AI very well integrated |
| Small-scale Costs | More granular but confusing | More straightforward, ideal for MVPs |
| Multi-environment Management | CDK excellent for pure DevOps | Terraform + GCP more natural in multi-region |
Both are valid. In general, I use AWS for scaling complex systems with many decoupled components, and GCP for quick MVPs, APIs, and mobile app backends.
Conclusion
I learned the hard way that infrastructure should not be a barrier to validating an idea or a chain that drags the business when it starts to grow.
Today, with the cloud and proper experience, we can help you:
- Launch a product in hours
- Replicate environments in minutes
- Scale to wherever demand requires
- And reduce cost to almost zero when not in use
If you’re designing your next system, or you’re stuck with an architecture that can’t keep up, at Redstone Labs we can help you scale intelligently, without empty promises, and with brutal focus on what matters most: your business.
Schedule a free discovery call and let’s put your architecture in turbo mode.