Articles : Scalability

Designing for scale is one of the fundamental principles of modern software engineering. However, an organization’s ambition to build scalable applications often exceeds its ability. While it's easy to see the incredible opportunities for scaling up and going global, many do not appreciate the biggest challenges facing development and DevOps teams building scalable apps.

We’ve looked at best practices for building scalable applications. We turn our attention now to the technical issues your development teams must address. This guide introduces ten software design principles for building scalable applications.

The Internet and web applications have enabled businesses to scale like never before. Previously, a business’s physical footprint restricted it to a particular market, and simple logistics limited the number of transactions per day. A similar company can now create web applications that serve a global audience and process thousands of concurrent transactions. But is this scale available to every business?

With climate change and resource shortages increasingly dangerous problems for our planet and society, it's important that we continue to increase efforts to live and work more sustainably. One of the key opportunities we have comes in the form of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) which are at the forefront of our technological innovation. The tech sector can play an important role in driving sustainability by enabling lower energy and resource use.

With computing technology constantly evolving, many companies stuck with aging systems need to revisit their current setups and possibly replace them with modern ones that are compatible with the cloud-centric microservices of today. And while keeping up to date with the latest software trends seems like an obvious choice for a technically minded person, the truth is that for many large companies where software is not their primary concern, having to upgrade or replace existing systems is incredibly expensive.

How To Stay Online, Scale-Up, And Keep Latency Down Launching a video game may be among the most challenging operational tasks today. Demand can be hard to predict. Launches are binary events that defy load testing. Setting up the right cloud infrastructure takes foresight and planning, and while over-provisioning wastes money, under-provisioning is probably even worse. Expect upset customers screaming at you on Twitter, Discord, and Reddit when a game starts glitching under the massive weight of millions of users. Here’s a quickstart guide to best practices for planning your cloud infrastructure to support a successful game launch.

The pandemic forced rapid scale-up and highlighted design decisions as critical to building an adaptive business. With the global economy suffering the consequences of COVID-19 and national lockdowns, there has been a large focus on cutting costs, reducing staff and stripping back to the bare necessities. In the land of application delivery and cloud computing, the reverse has happened. Companies rushed to provision more capacity in response to sustained increases in traffic and usage driven by the move from offline to online for so many activities.  

Our first blog of this series outlined the various challenges posed to DevOps and IT leaders resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. In this blog we take a closer look at why businesses need to design applications and IT infrastructure for dynamic scalability and how this can be achieved. 

In an upcoming series of blog articles we analyse the lessons to be learned from COVID-19 and how to design for uncertainty. This series tackles 5 main topics which are introduced below. To follow the series “Designing for Uncertainty” please subscribe to our blog.