It’s a common tale… someone has a great idea for an app, throws together a turnkey solution, puts it on a hosting account, and shares it with their local community. From there, it goes viral. Something that was intended for use by a few friends suddenly gets a huge number of users, causing the web server to grind to a halt.
Scalability issues can occur for many reasons, from inefficient database choices to poor coding, lack of load balancing or a lack of automation. Fortunately, these issues are preventable. With the right choices early on in the development process, you can make an app that scales.
How to Plan for Growth
To ensure your apps can cope with demand surges, consider the number of users you’re likely to have, and whether your existing infrastructure can cope with it. Many organizations, especially small or medium-sized ones, run their own on-premises solutions. These work well enough for lightweight websites, but the more interactive, rich apps users expect to see today are far more demanding.
Planning for growth means considering the hardware, software and networking aspects of deploying your application:
- Use Content Distribution Networks (CDNs): Using a CDN to host ‘heavy’ content such as images on multiple servers around the world reduces the load on your servers, and improves performance as users can get content from a server that’s closer to them.
- Use Caching Systems: Caching systems reduce the number of database queries required on busy websites and apps. Instead of regenerating pages frequently, popular pages are generated once and cached for a short period, so users who request that content within a period are shown a premade version.
- Evaluate Your ‘Stack’: Ask your developers what stack they’re using, and why they chose those things. A good developer is able to explain their rationale for choosing, for example, Postgres over MySQL or Apache over nginx.
- Reduce Your Data Use: Whether you have a website or a mobile app, it’s worth trying to limit your data use. Compress images and video files, minify JavaScript and look at how much data your app is sending and receiving. This will save your server resources, and cut down on your user’s data consumption too.
- Consider Load Balancing: Load balancing means spreading traffic across multiple servers to reduce the load placed on a single server. Unfortunately, many legacy applications and websites weren’t designed with load balancing in mind, but if you’re starting a new project it’s something to consider.
- Consider The Cloud: If you’re currently using a dedicated server or traditional VPS hosting for your apps or websites, consider whether a move to the cloud would be cost-effective. With traditional servers, you run the risk of under or overutilizing the server’s resources. With cloud services, you pay only for what you’re using, and can automatically scale your resources up and down based on current resource consumption.
There are many other considerations when it comes to scalability, especially for the project’s architecture. At Amplify, we have extensive experience with developing reliable and scalable applications. We know that even if your goals today are small, starting a project with scalable code will set you up for success in the future.
Custom Solutions Focused on Your Needs
Turnkey software and premade apps or content management systems can be a tempting solution to your app needs. However, this one-size-fits-all approach has clear limitations. Not only is it harder to get the look and feel you want for your project, but you’re likely to run into performance or even security issues because of the added complexity of these platforms.
Custom software solutions are tailored to your organization’s requirements, so they can be as lean or as complex as you require. We focus on creating performant software you can deploy to the cloud, making scaling a much easier task.
Get Your Project Off to a Strong Start
At Amplify, we have extensive experience in web and mobile application development. Our team works with a variety of programming languages and database systems, and we can deploy apps to your existing environment or Amazon’s AWS.
We understand that each organization has different needs, and we’ll discuss your goals, budget, and preferences in-depth before starting work. Our goal is always to create a website or app that represents your organization faithfully, and that you can rely on to give a good user experience, no matter how large or small your user base.
To learn more about how a custom software development project can help your organization reach its goals, contact Amplify today to book a consultation.