Gamification of Horizontal Scaling
A friend of mine recently introduced me to the game Factorio. In order to continue stroking my addiction, I’m going to use Factorio as a tool to continue teaching about scaling technology.
“Yes honey, I swear it’s work!” — me
I’ve previously written about data pipelines and message routing. In one post I used a fun example with a Gorilla Hairstylist in order to demonstrate routing messages through Kafka, a dumb (intentionally) message bus. One reason we use a tool like Kafka is to enable scaling of applications. Scaling means we increase the available capacity of a system in order to handle more data.
Let’s talk about the game for a bit. Factorio is an open world-building game. You begin as an astronaut stranded on an unknown and hostile planet. You have a pick axe and a few resources. In the beginning, you must manually mine ore, construct items and factories. Over time, you grow the technology and automation capabilities of your base, all while defending it from alien attacks. They don’t like the pollution you’re generating and they want you to cease and desist. Over time, you continually automate processes, tying them together to build out a series of complex manufacturing capabilities all the while focusing heavily on automation over manual intervention.
