Scale

This chapter covers horizontal scaling strategies for General Bots to support millions to billions of users across global deployments.

Overview

General Bots is designed from the ground up to scale horizontally. The architecture supports:

• Multi-tenancy: Complete isolation between organizations
• Regional sharding: Data locality for compliance and performance
• Database partitioning: Efficient handling of high-volume tables
• Stateless services: Easy horizontal pod autoscaling

Chapter Contents

• Sharding Architecture - How data is distributed across shards
• Database Optimization - Schema design for billion-scale
• Regional Deployment - Multi-region setup
• Performance Tuning - Optimization strategies

Key Concepts

Tenant Isolation

Every piece of data in General Bots is associated with a tenant_id. This enables:

1. Complete data isolation between organizations
2. Per-tenant resource limits and quotas
3. Tenant-specific configurations
4. Easy data export/deletion for compliance

Shard Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                      Load Balancer                          │
└─────────────────────────┬───────────────────────────────────┘
                          │
        ┌─────────────────┼─────────────────┐
        │                 │                 │
        ▼                 ▼                 ▼
   ┌─────────┐       ┌─────────┐       ┌─────────┐
   │ Region  │       │ Region  │       │ Region  │
   │   USA   │       │   EUR   │       │   APAC  │
   └────┬────┘       └────┬────┘       └────┬────┘
        │                 │                 │
   ┌────┴────┐       ┌────┴────┐       ┌────┴────┐
   │ Shard 1 │       │ Shard 2 │       │ Shard 3 │
   │ Shard 4 │       │ Shard 5 │       │ Shard 6 │
   └─────────┘       └─────────┘       └─────────┘

Database Design Principles

1. SMALLINT enums instead of VARCHAR for domain values (2 bytes vs 20+ bytes)
2. Partitioned tables for high-volume data (messages, sessions, analytics)
3. Composite primary keys including shard_id for distributed queries
4. Snowflake-like IDs for globally unique, time-sortable identifiers

When to Scale

Quick Start

To enable sharding in your deployment:

1. Configure shard mapping in shard_config table
2. Set SHARD_ID environment variable per instance
3. Deploy region-specific instances
4. Configure load balancer routing rules

See Sharding Architecture for detailed setup instructions.