The post-pandemic period offers opportunities throughout the economy. New enterprises emerge daily, while companies that weathered COVID-19 successfully are experiencing growth into newer and larger markets — some of which might not have existed before 2020.
Of course, rapid growth means scaling up and doing it quickly. The consulting firm BCG issued a report in 2022, “The Keys to Scaling Digital Value,” which described how digital, agile, technology and data transformations must respond to business volatility and expansion.
“Only digital solutions that scale can generate significant value, and the ability to scale digital solutions at speed differentiates companies that realize value from those that do not,” read the report.
Built In Los Angeles found three companies that are exemplary in how they embrace and pursue scalability to support company growth.
“Scalability is important because it allows our organization and our systems to flexibly respond to heightened demand, accommodate increased workloads or audiences and decrease our time-to-market,” said Vikram Gujarathi, FVP of Tech Operations at Agoura Hills-based Pennymac.
Scaling up is essential for all companies invigorated by current economic conditions — and that includes adding people along with technologies. Here is how Pennymac, Artera and FloQast manage to do so in very strategic ways.
Pennymac is a fintech, real estate and financial services company that empowers best-in-class customer experiences.
Describe what scalability means to you. Why is scalability important for the technology you’re building?
Our team is responsible for architecture, design review, data and systems delivery for Pennymac. To remain competitive in the market, it is essential for us to build solutions that enable futureproofing, agility, growth, cost efficiency and adaptability to changing business needs. With scalability, organizations such as Pennymac can build a resilient technological ecosystem that supports long-term success.
How do you build this tech with scalability in mind?
Building a scalable system requires extensive thought and preparation. Our process begins with group design sessions to discuss frameworks and solutions, then we prioritize core functionality and assess whether to build or buy external components.
With growth in mind, and by leveraging cloud technologies, it is imperative to build a functional, scalable system by choosing the right frameworks, database design, data caching and database optimization. This should be done while considering scalable solutions like modularity, comprehensive documentation, agile development and load testing to automate, monitor and analyze the performance of the systems.
It is imperative to build a functional, scalable system by choosing the right frameworks and database optimization.”
What tools or technologies does your team use to support scalability, and why?
Pennymac uses multiple cloud tools and technologies to build scalable systems because it allows for us to respond quickly and adapt with flexibility. We leverage AWS cloud systems, such as RDS, EC2, DMS for data management, which enables us to scale compute and storage capacity on demand. We also utilize serverless technologies in AWS such as AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS, S3 and AWS Step Functions, while working with automation tools like Liquibase CI and CD. To collaborate with our teams across states and time zones we use tools like Jira, Zoom, Slack, ServiceNow and Google’s G Suite systems. This keeps us organized and connected.
For data warehousing, data visualization, data analysis and business intelligence, we use tools and software platforms such Tableau, Snowflake and Informatica Cloud to quickly inspect, model and analyze the data.
Along with the previously stated systems AWS Cloudwatch, New Relic and Sumo Logic are also common systems we use to support, monitor and measure our scalable transformations.
Artera delivers a platform-level patient communications solution that integrates across a health system’s tech stack.
Describe what scalability means to you. Why is scalability important for the technology you’re building?
Scalability in the context of Artera’s platform is the ability of our application and infrastructure to handle an increasing amount of work, a need for resources or growth in users — without a significant decrease in performance — efficiency or functionality. It is a fundamental concept in our technology because it ensures that we can adapt and grow to meet evolving demands and challenges.
Scalability is critical for what we are building.”
Scalability is critical for what we are building as it directly impacts our ability to deliver a reliable and effective patient experience while accommodating changes in usage patterns, data volumes and complexity.
There are a few key reasons why it’s important. One is to meet user demands. As our customer base grows, scalability ensures that we can handle increased traffic and user interactions without slowdowns or outages. This is especially important for online services and applications.
Another is to handle increased data. Our platform receives, generates and processes vast amounts of data in databases, advanced data analytics and AI models. Scalability allows these systems to process and store more data as needed without sacrificing performance.
Also, it helps us adapt to workload peaks. Scalability ensures that our platform can handle spikes in usage throughout the day. Without having this capability, our system may struggle to maintain performance during these peak periods or waste resources during low volume periods.
How do you build this tech with scalability in mind?
Artera has a talented team of DevOps and software engineers who have a fundamental understanding of the scalability needs of our organization. As new services and features are designed the need for the application to be scalable and resilient are core requirements. The solutions we design and build use modern containerized tooling with significant automation included to handle the scaling and failover needs of our platform.
What tools or technologies does your team use to support scalability, and why?
Artera is primarily using AWS cloud technologies with Kubernetes as the key underlying platform. The flexibility of our EKS and virtualized Kubernetes clusters have been a key part of our current scalability. Of course, there are a lot of secondary technologies that also require some support from the team. At the end of the day our team uses technology that helps us future-proof our platform by allowing us to incorporate new features, components and technologies with small, frequent deployments while continuing to scale rapidly so that we can respond quickly to market changes and customer needs.
FloQast provides fintech software that automates common accounting workflows, helping accounting teams to operate more efficiently.
Describe what scalability means to you. Why is scalability important for the technology you’re building?
Scalability can take on a number of different definitions if you really think about it. As an engineering leader in the SaaS space, scaling software means the system is designed to extend its capacity as the user base grows without requiring major changes. Additionally, it supports more users without compromising up-time or response time. Essentially, this means that every user — no matter how many — who uses your system daily gets the same great experience, whether at peak time or in the middle of the night.
Scalability also means that as we increase our capacity we can control our resource costs so that, ultimately, we can offer the product at a competitive price to our customers. To that end, scalability means that as the user base grows we can still add additional features at a consistently high cadence.
At FloQast we build the next-generation software for accountants in a SaaS environment. That means our ability to support increased usage, improve the user experience and maintain business growth is critical. We aspire to function in every finance department, which requires flexible software that can add rapid change while maintaining stability, security and great user experiences.
How do you build this tech with scalability in mind?
Building a SaaS product in the cloud that can scale appropriately requires in-depth designing and thorough planning. There are several tactical ways to approach this.
Consider first the architecture. Planning and designing the right architecture is critical to scale the system. We need to be consistently iterating each component with the goal of being able to serve millions of customers.
Planning and designing the right architecture is critical to scale the system.”
Something else to think about is the team structure and APIs. We have to make sure that teams are not bottlenecking each other. We have to structure teams so each of them has its own API. Team communication will occur through those APIs — whenever we can we try to keep them stateless to make it easier for teams to work with each other.
We also use clusters. We separate our implementation into different sectors so that a single sector will not have more than five percent of our user base.
Database technologies have an important impact on scalability. We choose databases that can fit our software and which can also scale. Databases, other than NoSQL databases, will not require sharding and will be able to scale more efficiently across different clusters.
And finally, there is redundancy. We have a disaster recovery mechanism so that if a data center region is affected, the customer will be able to continue to work from a different data center.
What tools or technologies does your team use to support scalability, and why?
There are a number of tools that allow us to support our system’s scalability.
One is to use a public cloud. Public cloud platforms, like AWS, allow teams to efficiently leverage numerous technologies that are provided by a cloud provider. It reduces the need for dealing with hardware, data centers, network equipment and more.
Also, using serverless technologies gives you cloud provider technologies to scale the system as needed.
Something else to think about is how Git version control systems are incredibly important for collaboration between teams. They provide the ability to manage changes and to communicate at an individual level when committing the code or conducting code reviews.
Continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines are great ways to ensure the code reaches production quickly and efficiently. They also allow different systems — such as automation systems, security scanning and others — to verify the code in the pipes so that it can reach production securely.
Finally, think about data storage using a scalable storage solution from your cloud provider, which can allow your customers to store a significant amount of data.
