This is Part 1 of a guest post by Kris Beevers, founder and CEO, NSONE, a purveyor of a next-gen intelligent DNS and traffic management platform. Here's Part 2.

Every tech company thinks about it: the unavoidable – in fact, enviable – challenge of scaling its applications and systems as the business grows. How can you think about scaling from the beginning, and put your company on good footing, without optimizing prematurely? What are some of the key challenges worth thinking about now, before they bite you later on? When you’re building mission critical technology, these are fundamental questions. And when you’re building a distributed infrastructure, whether for reliability or performance or both, they’re hard questions to answer.

Putting the right architecture and processes in place will enable your systems and company to withstand the common hiccups distributed, high traffic applications face. This enables you to stay ahead of scaling constraints, manage inevitable network and system failures, stay calm and debug production issues in real-time, and grow your company and product successfully.

Who is this guy?

I’ve been building globally distributed, large scale applications for a long time.  Way back in the first dot-com boom, I bailed on college classes for a year and built backend infrastructure for a file-sharing startup which grew to millions of users – until the RIAA’s lawyers caught wind and sent us packing back to our dorm rooms. The business went bust, but I was hooked on scale.

More recently, at Voxel, an internet infrastructure provider that was acquired by Internap in 2011, I built global internet infrastructure used by many large web companies – we built globally distributed public cloud, bare metal as-a-service, content delivery networks, and much more. We learned a lot of scaling lessons, and we learned them the hard way.

Now, at NSONE, we’ve built a next-gen intelligent DNS and traffic management platform, which today services some of the largest properties on the Internet, including many companies who are themselves mission critical service providers.  This is truly globally distributed, mission critical infrastructure, and the lessons we learned at Voxel have served us well – and been reinforced time and again – as we’ve built and scaled the NSONE platform.

It’s time to share some of what we’ve learned, and with luck, maybe you can apply some of these lessons in your own applications – instead of learning them the hard way!

Architecture first