A system that works for 100 devices may completely fail at 100,000.
The architecture needs to account for scale early enough.
Some questions developers should ask:
How frequently does each device send data?
One message per hour is very different from 100 messages per second.
How many devices exist?
10, 1,000, and 1 million require very different infrastructure.
Can the backend handle spikes?
Devices may reconnect simultaneously after a network outage.
What happens to old data?
You probably don't want infinite raw storage.
How are devices provisioned?
Manually configuring thousands of devices isn't realistic.
How are failures handled?
Retries can accidentally create duplicate messages.
Scaling IoT isn't just about adding more servers.
It's about designing the entire pipeline to handle large numbers of unreliable physical devices.
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