From the earliest days of the field of quantum information, trapped atomic ions have had great potential as qubits. Trapped-ion experiments have separately demonstrated the individual ingredients believed necessary for scalable quantum information processing, and, for small numbers of ions, many of these ingredients have been combined within the same experimental system. The central challenge going forward is to enlarge these systems, so that many more qubits can be controlled at a much higher level of accuracy. This will require advances in ion trap materials and designs; a higher level of integration between traps, optics, and control systems; and a greater degree of automation in the experiments. I will discuss work in several of these areas, including the coupling of ions in separate traps, a record-high fidelity single qubit gate, and recent progress in microfabricated ion trap technologies.