How to Scale Your Web/Mobile Application Effectively
Scaling a web or mobile application is critical to ensure that it can handle increased traffic, user data, and other demands as it grows. To effectively scale your application, it is important to have a solid architecture, use cloud-based hosting platforms, implement caching and load balancing, optimize your database, use CDNs and asynchronous processing, monitor and analyze your application, automate deployment, and plan for growth. By following these tips, you can ensure that your application is prepared for increased traffic and user demands as it grows.
What is Web/Mobile Application Scalability
A simple definition of a web/mobile app’s scalability is the product’s ability to withstand greater loads due to the increased number of users.
A scalable app’s architecture is adapted to any significant workload so that the server, databases, frontend, and backend capabilities are equally stable regardless of the traffic ups and downs.
If your web app is about to serve a few hundred users with no prospects of significant growth, scalability might be an unreasonable waste of time and money. However, it’s a must-have for a modern startup or business that is about to increase the number of customers and serve a large audience’s needs.
Horizontal scaling vs. vertical scaling
Horizontal scaling, on the other hand, involves adding more machines to a system or application. This approach is suitable for large-scale applications that require high availability and fault tolerance. By distributing the workload across multiple machines, the system can handle a larger number of requests and provide better performance.
Vertical scaling involves increasing the resources of a single machine, such as adding more RAM, CPU, or storage capacity. This approach is suitable for small-scale applications that can run on a single server. However, as the application grows, it may not be feasible to scale vertically since there are hardware limitations on how much resources can be added to a single machine.
7 Tips Form As a Tech Lead
1. Setup a content delivery network
If you are planning on running a web server, then the best thing you can do is to prevent the actual traffic from hitting your machine. To do so, you can easily utilize CDNs (eg. CloudFront, Cloudflare, others) which gives you the possibility to cache some of the static contents of your application and reduce the number of requests per second thrown at it. This is super helpful, especially for any kind of images, blogs, marketing sites, and so on as these usually don’t need such dynamic changes.
2. Use serverless technologies
This is my favorite one actually. While creating a new app I always stumbled upon the issue of “how much resources will it need” or “does it cost me too much for how much traffic I have” and for that direction of thought, I highly recommend utilizing serverless technologies. They give you the advantage of paying only for the resources that you will be utilizing which in the long term may give you a lot of savings (but watch out! this isn’t the best solution for everything and it has its own disadvantages so it won’t work everywhere!)
3. Setup an internal caching tool
As a cache is one of the best ways to reduce app congestion (see point 1), internal caching will give you more out of the box. Usually, when you are redoing database queries that are quite static, you may want to utilize an in-memory cache to store these results and not bother about throwing additional workload. An inefficient database is one of the biggest concerns as without it your app may stop working altogether!
4. Clean code
Nothing is better than a clean codebase. Grab a team of specialists who know their trade, let them sit together and work on the issue and see how easy it is to read through their properly written code. As this one doesn’t imply the ease of “physical” scalability, it does however touch on the fact of maintainability and the possibility to extend/change app functionalities on-demand which may be crucial in these stressful scale needs.
5. Take care of your database
As most of the applications have some kind of persistent storage (whether it is physical or logical) you need to take care of it as it is usually the most crucial piece of the puzzle. You should be utilizing all the tools it gives you, such as setting up a master database and read-replicas for it to distribute the workload across different servers or optimize the servers which run these.
6. Manage the workflow efficiently
Does your API server need to make long-running jobs on the same server? Do you need these 10 servers waiting for work to come? Do you need to invoke this functionality synchronously? These questions are a great start to making things more efficient. You can reduce the load from server resources by throwing long-running jobs onto the others, you can set up the auto-scaling policy to reduce costs when the app doesn’t need this additional “friction”, you can utilize queues or notifications to invoke code asynchronously and so on. Try to find the most time-consuming place in your app and optimize it!
7. Use the orchestration tools
As most apps are inside of containers these days, to scale your application you may want to use orchestration tools that — once properly set — reduce your workload significantly. It, of course, depends on the platform that you run the solution on and its setup but it should improve general horizontal-scalability possibilities.
Conclussion
People often wonder if size matters… I’d say — scale matters ;). Rather it is a small or larger app, scaling makes it all easier and more efficient. And, that’s what it’s all about. You need to remember that without an adequate scaling mechanism, your app is unlikely to survive to the next day when a big influx of users hit at the same time. You need to be flexible and react to new circumstances really fast.
By following the 7 steps listed in this article, you can easily assure that your app will face any future growth. Brace yourself for success and… good luck!
