Engineering scalability into an application

Question

What does it mean to say - Engineering scalability into applications. Are there design patterns that would make an application more scalable? This question is mainly in the cont

Answer 1

Very broadly, scalability means an increase in system load can be handled with a proportionally smaller increase in assets that must be marshaled to serve that load.

If the load on your web app increased by a factor of 100, what would you do?

One fundamental principal for scalability is the identification and elimination of potential bottlenecks in processing, including parallelization of constricting tasks. But that's just a taste; I'm sure you'll get lots of other equally valid answers.

Edit: note that bottlenecks occur not just in actual task processing. They can be in overall process setup, necessary hardware operations, maintenance tasks, redesign/refactoring, you name it.