Scalability in the cloud depends a lot on application design.  Keep these important points in mind when you are designing your web application and you will scale much more naturally and easily in the cloud.

** Original article — Intro to EC2 Cloud Deployments **

1. Think twice before sharding

• It increases your infrastructure and application complexity
• it reduces availability – more servers mean more outages
• have to worry about globally unique primary keys

2. Bake read/write database access into the application

• allows you to check for stale data, fallback to write master
• creates higher availability for read-only data
• gracefully degrade to read-only website functionality if master goes down
• horizontal scalability melds nicely with cloud infrastructure and IAAS

3. Save application state in the database

• avoid in-memory locking structures that won’t scale with multiple web application servers
• consider a database field for managing application locks
• consider stored procedures for isolating and insulating developers from db particulars
• a last updated timestamp field can be your friend

4. Consider Dynamic or Auto-scaling

• great feature of cloud, spinup new servers to handle load on-demand
• lean towards being proactive rather than reactive and measure growth and trends
• watch the procurement process closely lest it come back to bite you

5. Setup Monitoring and Metrics

• see trends over time
• spot application trouble and bottlenecks
• determine if your tuning efforts are paying off
• review a traffic spike after the fact

The cloud is not a silver bullet that can automatically scale any web application.  Software design is still a crucial factor.  Baking in these features with the right flexibility and foresight, and you’ll manage your websites growth patterns with ease.

Have questions or need help with scalability?  Call us:  +1-213-537-4465

Also published on Medium.