Serverless Scaling: Architecture Patterns

Issue #101: System Design Interview Roadmap • Section 4: Scalability

When Auto-Scaling Becomes Your Bottleneck

Your serverless function just received 10,000 concurrent requests. Traditional thinking says "serverless handles this automatically," but here's what actually happens: your platform creates 10,000 container instances, each establishing database connections, loading application context, and competing for shared resources. What promised infinite scale becomes a coordination nightmare.

This fundamental misunderstanding separates amateur serverless implementations from production-grade systems. Today, we'll explore the architecture patterns that make serverless truly scalable.

What We'll Build Today

• Predictive Cold Start Mitigation: Intelligent warm-up patterns that eliminate user-facing latency

• Shared Resource Orchestration: Connection pooling strategies for ephemeral compute

• Geographic Overflow Routing: Multi-region scaling that optimizes both performance and cost

• Request Batching Engine: Cost optimization through intelligent operation grouping

The Hidden Scaling Challenge: State Coordination

[Serverless Scaling Architecture Overview]