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Are you interested in building scalable web applications?
When it comes to large-scale web applications, performance holds the key. Scalability is the ability of an application to achieve high performance irrespective of the number of people using the application at any given point in time. A large scale web application can effectively handle high volumes of data and traffic and quickly adapt to voluminous load changes without affecting the quality of operations.
What are the characteristics of a large scale Web application?
There are several challenges that arise from connecting heterogeneous solutions to work cohesively as a single application. You should have a large development team to optimize for performance and scalability, designers and developers to provide support.
- Performance: Whether it is hundreds, thousands, or millions of users transactions per second, large-scale applications can handle voluminous user requests on applications easily.
- Distributed: Large-scale applications are distributed with servers that are geographically closer to users, leveraging CDNs. In absence of data centers, you can run in the cloud.
- Data: Deal with a large volume of data and with lots of data types such as customer behavior tracking, page views, logs, products, orders, and more. It can handle different data types.
- Availability: It can be accessed at any time of the day or week.
How do you make a large scale application?
Let‘s review the steps to build large-scale web applications.
Always consider stakeholder expectations
Managing stakeholder expectations is an important aspect when it comes to building scalable web applications. It is vital to clearly communicate and explain to the stakeholders the challenges involved, timelines, as well as justifying the expenses scale-up. Setting the expectations right is the key as such projects could possibly add layers of complexities to the system and adding features in the future could become harder. It is important not to jump on the scalability bandwagon just because every other business is doing the same.
Here are the questions to answer
- Are you expecting a steep increase in the number of users?
- What is the time frame of release at the user level
- Can your customer base fit in the current server?
- Is there any room for change in terms of the storage plan to accommodate the increase?
- What options do you have in case you experience a drastic increase in user and data traffic?
Define Scalability and Use Right Tools
It is important to define scalability challenges based on the metrics. There are several factors such as CPU usage which indicates the problem area that your app is already experiencing performance issues, as well as Network I/O and Disk I/O.
In order to identify problem areas, it is important to strategically leverage app-monitoring tools. There are several tools out there to highlight your problems areas based on the metrics, allowing you to go deeper into the problem and resolve issues hindering the scalability of your app.
These initial results are your benchmarks. Hold onto the tool you choose to keep tracking the metrics during and after developing a large-scale app.
Infrastructure Options for scalability
PaaS is a cloud computing model where the managed cloud services provider takes care of many aspects essential for scalability.
Scaling with the right database
For scaling, the database is an obvious focus area after you have addresses the infrastructure and architecture aspects. Note that there are no ’one-size-fits-all‘ recommendations when it comes to databases. Finally, whichever database you choose, you will need to integrate it into your app.
Select a framework that aids scalability
It‘s time we focus on the development framework since it has a noticeable impact on scalability. Depending on your choice of the development language, select the most appropriate frameworks.
Which framework is best for large-scale applications?
- Angular(Also, know as Angular JS)
- ASP.NET
- Laravel
- CodeIgniter
- ReactJS
- NodeJs
- Django
- Express
Have A More Complex Web Application Scalability Requirement?
If you have a specific and complex web application scalability project, it is important to partner with a company comprising of business analysts, IT architects, designers, testers, cloud architects, project managers, and more.
Hiring a dedicated development team with niche skills can be hard depending on your geography, moreover, you need to manage the project end-to-end. Consider engaging a leading web application development company.
