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.
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