From the web site High Scalability is a nice article on scaling a service on Amazon Web Services from one to over 11 million users. It’s based on a talk by Joel Williams from AWS.

He lists these main points.

• Start with SQL and only move to NoSQL when necessary.

• A consistent theme is take components and separate them out. This allows those components to scale and fail independently. It applies to breaking up tiers and creating microservices.

• Only invest in tasks that differentiate you as a business, don’t reinvent the wheel.

• Scalability and redundancy are not two separate concepts, you can often do both at the same time.

• There’s no mention of costs. That would be a good addition to the talk as that is one of the major criticisms of AWS solutions.

The section for just one user is also quite helpful.

• Run on a single instance, maybe a type t2.micro. Instance types comprise varying combinations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity and give you the flexibility to choose the appropriate mix of resources for your applications.

• The one instance would run the entire web stack, for example: web app, database, management, etc.

• Use Amazon Route 53 for the DNS.

• Attach a single Elastic IP address to the instance.

A Beginner’s Guide To Scaling To 11 Million+ Users On Amazon’s AWS

AWS re:Invent 2015 | (ARC301) Scaling Up to Your First 10 Million Users