Creating a Web App: How to develop a scalable web application
Facebook already had one million users in 2004. By mid-2016, the number of users had already increased to 1.7 billion.
As soon as users access Facebook, they want to be immediately directed to their newsfeed or to the topics that matter to them. Or they want to post something in the community, so they quickly want to write something. And that’s exactly what they do. It’s the scalability of the action.
Yahoo and Google – these are sites that, among other things, dominate the market and are used by millions and millions of users at any moment, with this gigantic user base not posing a problem. The performance enhancement of a website is the ability of a project to expand its features by increasing the number of modules that perform the same tasks.
Guiding Principles for Scalable Websites – Critical Tips for Their Development
Before deciding on the design architecture, the following planning considerations must be critically examined
Availability
For a company that must maintain its reputation, a website that is accessible at all times is vital. This is especially true for large online retailers. Even a brief period during which the website is unavailable can result in millions in lost revenue. This applies to SaaS, online publishers, and any other company with a web application. Continuous availability can only be guaranteed if, during development, it is taken into account that the website is protected against both hacker attacks and technical failures. Additionally, in the event of a failure, an immediate restoration of the system should take place.
Performance
A scalable website with low performance can negatively impact SEO rankings. The performance must be enhanced to provide quick responses as well as fast retrieval in order to achieve a higher level.
Reliability in Retrieval
When a user searches for specific data, they should receive this information within a very short time. Additionally, the data should be updated as frequently as possible. Users should also have the assurance that data found on the internet can be retrieved at any time.
Usability
The system of the Web App must be easy to use as well as easy to maintain and update. All issues should be easily identified.
Operating Costs
These not only consist of hardware and software. They also include the development costs, as well as the costs to keep the system running. The total operating costs encompass everything involved in owning the website and keeping the system running.
It is important to follow all these rules to ensure the success and growth of a Web App. However, despite all these rules, there must be a degree of flexibility to adapt to the given situation. If the operator decides to address the high-performance issue by acquiring additional servers, this increases the operating costs and can complicate management.
Architectural Foundations
Over time, it has proven unwise to rely on full performance from the start rather than initially building the system with a solid architecture. At the same time, any potential performance enhancement must be kept in mind. This saves time and financial resources that can later be better allocated for performance expansion.
These Core Factors Make Performance Enhancement Easier Later On
Services
There are two services that should be made available to the users of a website – reading and writing. For example, a large website that offers photos serves its users by allowing them to search for photos, which is equivalent to reading. If they like a photo, they can select it, which in turn is akin to writing. Most providers prefer that read content be offered as quickly and as frequently as possible, because it is faster than writing. However, these decisions must be made during the design phase of the website.
Building a small Web App that is managed on a single server would be pointless. It should absolutely include a web architecture that is designed to be scalable and performance-enhancing, enabling the user to retrieve more data of any kind. Additionally, sufficient storage capacity and rapid recovery should be possible.
Dividing the Functions
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the solution. Each service, such as writing and reading, can operate in its own functional context.
In Case of Problems, the Following Approach Should Be Taken
Fault Tolerance
In web development, care should also be taken to ensure that a loss of data or similar issues does not immediately compromise the entire system. Thus, a degree of fault tolerance is required, allowing for a certain tolerance to losses. Such special cases include, for example:
Failover:
If a server suddenly fails, it can cause significant damage, which can be mitigated by having a copy of the system.
Distributed Architecture
If each node operates independently, additional nodes can be added at any time without affecting the others. In this way, performance can be gradually enhanced.
Failure of a Node
If a node fails or malfunctions, it does not affect the other nodes.
Divisions
It is not necessary to utilize the full capacity during development. However, the website should be designed so that it can be upgraded at any time. There are two types of performance enhancement – vertical scaling or horizontal scaling.
Vertical Scaling
There are several ways to increase performance, such as adding additional drives or even additional servers. The larger and more powerful the servers, the more performance will be available to the system in the future. In this case, not only is an increase in storage important, but the CPU should also operate significantly faster.
Horizontal Scaling
In this case, more nodes are added. Additionally, further servers or other computing resources can be integrated.
High-Performance and Fast Data Access – Strategies and Methods
A simple Web App includes the internet, an app server, and database servers. Developing a Web App should incorporate future growth. There are types of access – on one hand through app servers and on the other through the database. When building a Web App, the app server typically considers different partitions, which entirely depends on the underlying architecture. This also enables horizontal performance enhancement. The heavy lifting is managed both by the database servers and by the service.
There are certain challenges and similarly practical methods to enable the performance of the database or other service systems. Additionally, both ample storage capacity and fast data access should be provided.
Cache Storage
The principle of the Web App is simple: Data that has been recently requested is very likely to be requested again.
These caches are used in most layers of the data architecture to facilitate the rapid retrieval of data or files. To ensure long-term speed, the original source in the database should be considered. Unfortunately, there are only a few points where a Web App can be implemented.
Start at the Node
It is possible to integrate a node in such a way that data is preemptively stored and immediately available to the user. If no data is found in the node, it can also reside on a data disk. The more performance is required, the more nodes should be installed. However, the architecture must be developed to better balance and handle increased future loads. For this purpose, the desired data is sent to a specific node so that it can adapt to the greater potential.
Proxies
Proxies can be a great help in boosting performance and in processing data. However, it is also possible that users might be dissatisfied with the offering, and that the available data is scarcely accessible through a search.
Indexes
By adding indexes to the original website architecture, the advantage of being able to read all data faster will also have a financially performance-enhancing impact. If there are huge data sets in terabytes, but the user is only searching for a tiny portion, the search must be optimized. In this context, indexes can also be beneficial for the Web App. Load Balancer
The load balancer is a critical component of the architecture in the overall development of the Web App. The concept is intended to prevent the load during periods of increased usage by users from interfering with each other. The load balancer distributes requests equally across the nodes, ensuring consistent performance of the Web App. Therefore, a Web App can also be significantly facilitated by the addition of new nodes, as the load balancer ensures that requests are evenly distributed.
Nginx is a good choice for node process load balancing, and it is also very easy to configure and use. Additionally, developers can assign different weights, which is especially intended for horizontal performance enhancement.
Conclusion
Larger projects with high loads require extensive experience and specific expertise from the operators. When designing a Web App, future performance enhancement should be factored in from the very beginning. This is even more important than designing the layout, as the performance of a Web App is a major determinant of its success. An early focus on performance enhancement saves the operators a great deal of time and money. Overall, there are many plans and methods to boost the performance of a Web App. Ultimately, the structures should be designed to handle millions of visitors per month in the future. To avoid reaching undesirable performance limits later on with a Web App, the architecture should be designed so that it can be easily and flexibly upgraded in various ways at any time.
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