Scalability is one of the most pivotal ways to set your application up for success. Building scalable apps have many benefits for your company – it helps save money, facilitates business growth and maintains a seamless user experience. Simply put, it is the potential of your application to handle more users, requests and load without any interruptions or crashes, as it grows.
You should develop your application accounting for scalability from the get-go so that the system is equipped to manage an increasing number of requests. In this blog, we take you through the best practices that you must follow for developing a successful large-scale web application.
Which Are Some Popular Scalable Applications?
1. Amazon:
Amazon is the largest e-commerce platform in the world and naturally, requires constant scaling. Amazon leverages microservices to independently manage each feature like notifications, search, buy, add to cart, personalization and more which enables millions of deployments in a year without any downtime for users.
2. Spotify:
This popular audio streaming app has over 356 million monthly active users and is growing. The app uses microservices architecture with each component dedicated to a specific objective. In case one component becomes faulty, the rest of the app remains unaffected.
3. Uber:
Uber makes use of independent microservices for different functions such as driver management, passenger management and more. Uber focused only on services that needed scaling, which was achieved without disrupting other services.
How To Design Large-Scale Web Applications?
Follow these best practices to build resilient and robust large-scale web applications.
1. Choose An Architecture With Independent Components:
A scalable application should ideally consist of small, independent components that are managed and deployed separately. This makes the application more flexible and resilient by avoiding single points of failure. Using an architecture with independent components also allows developers the freedom to use different technology stacks and enables smooth collaboration with multiple teams sitting across countries or regions.
Refrain from using monolithic architecture in this case, as all components are tied together leading to a potential breakdown of the entire application in case of any errors.
2.Choose The Right Framework:
Selecting the right framework will ensure that the process of scaling up the application does not come up with unexpected challenges. The best way to choose a framework is to go with something that is tried and tested and offers ample community support. You must also assess the architecture as well as the features & functionalities of the application and the technology stack to decide on the framework most suitable for your project. Popular and most widely used frameworks include Ruby on Rails, Django, Node.js and React.js.
3.Carry Out Testing Regularly:
The frequency and efficiency of application testing greatly affect the entire development cycle. Go with Test-driven Development or TDD to achieve instant feedback on the performance of your application. With the TDD approach, test cases are used prior to complete development to assess various scenarios and monitor performance with iterations.
Both performance and load-testing should be executed to help evaluate different cases such as identifying real-time glitches, calculating application response time, measuring operating system compatibility and more. Creating user personas to test the application against different situations can also increase testing efficiency and boost application performance.
4. Distribute Traffic Evenly:
Using multiple servers ensures that there is no single point of failure as the load is distributed among them. However, the key is to ensure that the load is evenly distributed between all servers. A load balancer is typically used for this purpose. Acting as an intermediary between the clients and servers, load balancers register IP addresses of servers to route traffic between both.
You must not rely on a single load balancer as that defeats the logic of avoiding a single point of failure. Instead, aim to install multiple load balancers where one can route traffic and others can act as backups in case of malfunction.
5. Choose A Robust Database Management System:
Select a strong database to maintain consistency and integrity in data. As in the case of servers, use multiple databases to effectively scale your web application. Using multiple databases increases the ability of your application to manage additional users and still deliver excellent performance.
With this ‘Replication’ method, all queries on the master database are automatically executed on the other databases as well, so in case of failure in the master database, one of the other databases can immediately take over. A mix of SQL and NoSQL databases distributed across the world give the advantage of benefitting from the unique features of both systems.
6. CI And CD Are Essential:
Both Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery go hand-in-hand while designing large-scale web applications. Large scale projects usually have a number of developers working in parallel and require outcomes to be reflected almost immediately. Implementing CI and CD makes it easy for developers to spend more time working on the features and functionalities of the application rather than worrying about testing and deployment tasks.
Final Words
Developing scalable web applications will help you meet growing demands, achieve optimum ROI and deliver delightful experiences to users. Due care must be exercised while developing the application to reap the maximum benefits that scalability has to offer. Choosing the right architecture, framework, database management systems in addition to conducting frequent testing and utilizing multiple servers are all important factors to consider for developing successful large-scale web applications
