Best practices for designing scalable software
Trying to make your product scalable? That’s usually an exhaustive task. Making a product scalable really needs detailed attention in the development process. But apart from developing a well-written application code, multiple practices can be followed to enhance the scalability of the product. Here are a few tips:
• Ensure Availability: Avoid a single point of failure for your system, have a fallback option.
• Load Balancing: Use load balancing techniques to distribute the requests to the application. This can be extended not only on app servers but to data servers as well.
• Distributed Approach: Separate out multiple services of your application, try to distribute them – to separate processes or threads. The API-based approach can help in distributing load as well as allowing independent upgrades. Offload work away from the main process when possible – for example in client-server applications, make clients handle jobs that do not need server assistance.
• Use caching: Real-time data might not be the need of your application. Actively use caching at multiple layers. Think about data freshness requirements closely. Many times, delayed delivery of updated information doesn’t impact the usability of the information.
• Make it maintainable: Make sure best development practices are followed to build the application. This would make the application maintainable and easily scalable if the design is extensible.
• Use the right technology: Consciously select what technology stack is to be used for the application. The reasoning for rejecting other technology over a selected one should be clearly articulated.
• Loose coupling: Make sure your modules are loosely coupled and work independently. This would ensure work distribution without dependency on other modules.
• Async helps: Avoid sequential processing. In some scenarios. Synchronized processing would be the only choice available. But whenever there is a scope, which will be the case mostly, ensure you do not block or wait for any operations to complete in order to proceed.
Some of these suggestions directly relate to additional costs, for example creating replication servers, load balancing, etc. Whereas many of the other aspects rely heavily on the choices made in the design and development process. The latter case – definitely is something that would save a lot of cost for any application, making it scalable easily by infrastructure extensions.
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