In software product development, there are challenges at every stage, certainly. As the business grows and explores, critical aspects like scalability become evident to manage. Hence, designing a software architecture with high performance and consistent traffic needs lots of strategies.
In the blog, we will talk about the best practices you can use to implement a highly scalable system architecture.
Before diving in, let's start with the introduction first -
By definition, Product Scalability refers to measuring a business's ability to handle the incrementing product demand and its utilization. Also, how a product's usage and system complexities are addressed without compromising its performance. Meaning, that the way a business can grow and adapt to the rising user demand without creating any obstacles to the product's success is what product scalability means.
But, product scalability isn't just about handling, but implementing the updates and adapting to new elements as per user's needs. For example, a Software product engineering company needs to update its byproduct regularly. It can be anything from adding new features to installing new software or improvising any functionality. Ideally, Best practices for scalable system architecture involve technical, and business aspects both.
Many companies experience high levels of traffic spikes while undergoing the software product development stage. Whether they're a startup running a SaaS platform, or any enterprise managing an e-commerce site, a fast-growing company must efficiently handle the increased workloads. Furthermore, it must manage the increased demands most flexibly and cost-effectively as possible.
Various roadblocks tend to arise with strategies for product scalability. If not addressed, it creates hurdles in the overall product performance, thereby hindering business growth. Some of the notable challenges are mentioned here -
Consider it or not, but availing an inflexible technology architecture is the core problem of businesses experiencing a thrift in product scalability. Outdated technologies no longer support the increased customer demand. The result is the commonest (and most irritating) of problems like product slowdown, slower response time, and even system crashes!
Product scalability often is an act of balancing the overall performance and the factors affecting the product cost. System upgradation requires consistent homework, monitoring, and analyzing the arising needs to cope with. Not setting up a budget management can quickly lead to unwanted expenses. So, keeping the business needs and the costs in check is of utmost importance.
This one is a taken-for-granted approach, especially for companies that already experience high traffic. However, a dedicated Software product engineering company will never overlook this scenario. The challenge to attain and maintain a positive user experience is a must-win factor. Customers of today's era expect high-defining interactivity and are quick to drop you off if you don't help them out.
It's great to experience rapid growth in the business. But without control, you'll surely lose everything as quickly. Maintaining prompt control over the internal process is another challenge to look after under product software development.
Acquaint provides excellent Software product engineering services with top-notch elements involved in the overall product development. Reach out to us now to speak to our talented pool of experts!
To survive a business where product scalability isn't just an addition but a necessity, you need to create a strong foundation. It requires key pointers involving core strategies and technology aspects. Furthermore, there are many building blocks to ultimately form the best practices for scalable system architecture as under -
The very first case is with Load balancing.
Basically, load balancing is the distribution of the incoming traffic into multiple servers. This is to ensure that no single server could get overloaded with too much traffic spike, therefore reducing the burden. This technique consists of load balancers, which act as intermediaries between the server and the client.
The main aim of the load balancers is to distribute traffic load. For this, it uses methods such as IP hash, round-robin, least connections, weight distribution, sticky sessions, geo-based load balancing etc. Load balancing tools like Nginx and HAProxy act as some of the best software for automated scalability management, including cloud-based solutions like AWS Elastic Load Balancer. However, it is to note that technology shift is constant and changes may arise at any time.
Key Notes:
Load balancers are of two distinct types -
Hardware-based - As part of network infrastructure deployed into data centers
Software-based - To be installed in commodity servers, generally cheaper than the hardware balancers, but more dynamic as compared to them.
Auto-scaling is the automatic procedure of responding to traffic variations by adding/deleting the servers. With this technology, the system can respond accordingly to sudden traffic increments, without experiencing the need for user intervention.
Furthermore, there are two distinct types of auto-scaling -
Also known as scaling out, horizontal scaling in software product development refers to increasing a system's capacity with the addition of more servers/machines. Its main aim is to distribute the workload among larger individual units to manage the load.
Basically, to implement horizontal scaling you need not replace the server or change its capacity. As there's no downtime in adding more servers to the network (likewise in vertical scaling), this type of auto-scaling proves advantageous.
Key Notes:
Horizontal scaling allows the system to handle more number of incoming requests, thereby accommodating the growing traffic effortlessly.
The workload can be evenly distributed, enhancing the system's performance and ensuring its work efficiency furthermore.
It improves the system's reliability promoting a greater fault tolerance and minimizing the downtime risk.
Also known as scaling up, vertical scaling ideally is a process of increasing the core capacities of hardware/software components within the system. Meaning, you can make your system more powerful with some power-incrementing adjustments like RAM and processor updates.
The main segment of vertical scaling in software product development is to improve the overall performance and system capacity. So that the system could easily handle more complex tasks without making any compromises to its fundamental architecture (or without adding any additional servers also).
Key notes:
Vertical scaling is simpler to implement as it focuses on improving a single server.
It's user-friendly as is less complicated to manage.
Easily adaptable to handle more traffic requests just by improving the hardware.
Every system is dedicated to a main task that needs to be completed. Any interruption in between the tasks can result in difficulties in performance. Asynchronous processing is a process to handle multiple requests through back ground, without hindering the main task. Furthermore, this is helpful to cut reaction time and improve the overall system performance.
Considered one of the best practices for scalable system architecture, asynchronous processing creates another task as a sub-task to be performed in the background. This technique does not creates any blockage in the main task, nor instructs them to wait while the sub task is getting completed.
Key Notes:
Threading, promises, and callbacks are some forms of asynchronous processing.
It allows system activities to be performed concurrently, thereby allowing it to handle more queries.
It promotes higher scalability by aligning the tasks and executing them when resources are available.
Your system can easily manage the increased number of requests without any further resource addition.
By definition, a distributed database is a combination of many databases geographically distributed over multiple sites. Furthermore linked by a network and functions as a single logical database. Businesses can easily handle heavy traffic with the best software for automated scalability management. Likewise is the case with the distributed database architecture.
Mainly, the databases are sharded (partitioned) and then copied (replicated) among different databases under the distribution technique. This is done to achieve higher data availability and therefore a better fault tolerance.
Key Notes:
Distributed database works by the process of Data sharding >> Data replication >> Data distribution
With data duplication, system availability is ensured. If one server fails, another server can take up the task quickly.
Another best practice for scalable system architecture, caching excessively deals with website traffic (and application also). Fundamentally, caching is an approach to reduce the reaction time by storing the frequently searched data in its memory.
Accomplishing caching is quite easy through methods like browser caching, in-memory caching, and edge caching. Collectively, it reduces reaction time, henceforth promoting the system's performance.
Caching is very effective in reducing the server load by keeping user's data requests temporarily. This way, when a user requests the same type of data again, the server does not need to recalculate the answer. Instead, it can fetch the same cache data as stored, thereby providing a quick and cost-effective method.
Look no further with Acquaint Softech Agile Software product engineering services. We offer the best range of cost-efficient and result-oriented solutions, catering to your business needs exceptionally!
Product scalability is all about implementing strategies like maintenance, network segmentation, etc. alongside the best software for automated scalability management. If you use the most advanced tools for regular monitoring and disaster recovery, there are chances of more system stability as well. Also, these practices can ensure smooth system performance and work efficiency.
It's how you identify the challenges, navigate through them, and execute them for a further more successful product scalability.
I love to make a difference. Thus, I started Acquaint Softtech with the vision of making developers easily accessible and affordable to all. Me and my beloved team have been fulfilling this vision for over 15 years now and will continue to get even bigger and better.
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