Nano Testing: Why Scaling Down Makes Your Cloud Stronger

The cloud has been around for more than 20 years. Steve Ballmer even said we knew about the cloud in 1995 already, so it wasn’t really a surprise when AWS took off in the mid-2000s. (Acquired podcast)

Why the Cloud Took Off

For developers and startups, the cloud was a game-changer because it allowed them to:

• Focus on coding instead of managing servers.
• Start lean without heavy upfront infrastructure costs.
• Scale quickly if their product suddenly took off.

The scaling argument has always been the loudest: what if tomorrow we get 10,000 customers because of a viral tweet? Sometimes that happens, but most of the time it doesn’t. (I might be guilty of that kind of thinking myself.)

The Reality of Scaling

When your startup does grow and you start scaling your infrastructure, what really happens? Often it turns out that:

• Important indexes are missing, leading to CPU spikes.
• Query results are loaded into memory without paging, causing out-of-memory errors.
• Other inefficiencies appear that raw cloud scaling alone cannot solve.

The result is often not a sleek, hyper-scalable system but an extremely expensive piece of cloud infrastructure.

The best part about scaling: Downsizing

The best part about the cloud is not just that it scales up. It also lets you scale down.

Recently, we ran a load test we called nano testing. The idea was simple: take our infrastructure and run it on AWS EC2 nano instances. That is as small as it gets on AWS.

A nano instance has 512MB RAM and 2 virtual CPUs. That reminds me of my gaming PC from the year 2000. For comparison, your smartphone today probably has 10–20 times more RAM. We then dumped in about four times the amount of test data we normally process.

Can It Run on Nanos?

The fun begins when you try to make your platform run decently on nanos. It does not have to be blazing fast. The key question is: does it run at all?

If some API queries take a few seconds, or some asynchronous jobs and emails are processed with a bit of lag, that is perfectly fine. If your system can handle this, it means you have built something resilient.

Running on nanos lets you pinpoint weaknesses in your platform very clearly. Fixes are often low-hanging fruit:

• Add batch processing here.
• Add an index there.
• Add throttling in another place.

Our Approach at All Quiet

At All Quiet, we now run a dedicated environment entirely on nanos, fully integrated into our CI/CD pipeline. This allows us to observe scaling issues early and fix them before they turn into real problems.

Questions? Drop us a note.

- Peer
CEO & Co-Founder of All Quiet