In this blog post, our Chief Technology Officer Tony Allen discusses the importance of scalable technology and how Recurly ensures every customer is set up for success with our cutting-edge technology. 

Technology is evolving, and it evolves rapidly. 

In today’s day and age, companies need to continually invest in scalable technology to stay competitive. What I've found throughout my career is that the lack of investment in that area leads to challenges during extreme periods of growth, which end up pulling focus away from the development of new features and functions needed by customers. Sooner or later, you’ll need to make these investments, but if you respond reactively instead of proactively, the impact will be less meaningful and implementation will happen less efficiently.

Below, I dive deeper into the real impact of technology and how you may be hurting your business if you’re not willing to invest in it.

Technology to power growth

Growth appears in a number of ways, but an intelligent, thoughtful way of understanding growth is knowing it comes in parts. As an organization, we look at the larger components but understanding how the smaller individual components link the larger pieces together is what allows us to scale sustainably.

For example, a lot of companies will ask how they can horizontally scale their database platform but forget about their queuing or job scheduling platforms. Make sure you’re investing holistically across your organization.

A new way of thinking

A traditional technology stack consists of a non-cloud-based platform with a physical data center, filled to the brim with physical servers. When companies with this line-up think about scalability, they’re thinking about how many servers can fit in a rack, how much power density can run within that rack, and how much space they can get in a physical data center to support all of this.

As companies start to transition to the cloud–and a lot of them are–many are still possessed by the concepts of physical servers and attempt to force them to fit seamlessly into the cloud. With this mindset, it’s difficult to dynamically scale up or down because you’re treating it as if it’s still a data center–just in a new space, severely limiting your business from the possibilities of scaling within the cloud.

At Recurly, we went from a physical data center all the way to a completely virtualized environment. Every virtual instance of Recurly exists in the cloud, with the complete ability to manipulate these instances at any given time. Being cloud-native is more than migrating from a physical data center to a cloud provider–it’s actually adopting the concept that you can truly scale with ease. 

This is only the beginning

We are constantly evaluating our technology stack and innovating on top of it. Because Recurly’s tech stack is up-to-date, we were able to quickly and adeptly launch a new European data center recently. That provided us with another opportunity to reevaluate our entire technology library to ensure that we can deliver the best global solution in the industry. We are perpetually seeking opportunities to reinvest in our business and to make sure we’re providing our customers with the best technology for scalability and reliability.