The Pre-Scale Architecture Checklist
The gate to clear before you touch the architecture. Score yourself out of 12 — the higher you land, the more a rewrite is actually justified.
About this resource
What to check before you rebuild for scale you don't have yet, so you fix the two things that actually break instead of everything. Covers the questions that separate a real scaling problem from a focus problem, the cheapest wins that buy the most headroom, and when to extract a service — and when not to.
What you'll walk away with
- The system usually isn't slow because the architecture is wrong — it's one query, one missing index, or one endpoint nobody profiled.
- Size for the next 12–18 months of plausible load, not a hypothetical 100x.
- Max out a single bigger box before you add the complexity of a distributed system.
What's inside
- 01Prove the bottleneck — measure before you touch anything
- 02Cheap wins first — hours of work before months of rewrite
- 03The data layer
- 04When to actually split
WHO THIS IS FOR
Seed to Series B founders and CTOs tempted to re-architect or rewrite for scale.
Written by Ganesh Kompella, fractional CTO and CPO. Based on 75+ engagements across healthcare, fintech, and SaaS — these are the frameworks we actually use with clients, not a summary of someone else's.
Need help thinking this through? Book a 30-min call — no pitch.
Would rather talk it through than read it?
Book a Free 30-Min Strategy CallMore resources
checklist
Technical Due Diligence Checklist
The 40-point checklist we run when assessing a technology team for investors and acquirers.
Get itguide
The Fractional CTO Hiring Guide
How to evaluate, hire, and actually work with a fractional CTO — drawn from 75+ engagements.
Get ittemplate
Product Roadmap Template
A roadmap that holds strategic vision and execution detail in one document — and survives a stakeholder review.
Get it