Highly Scalable Internet Architectures

The Power and the Challenge of the Internet is it’s scalability. How do you construct a “store” that can accomodate 10 to 10,000 in the same time period.

To succeed you have to understand how you will scale at each layer in the Internet Delivery Stack.

To discuss solutions to your scalability challenges contact OTC at 734-213-2020 or email sales@onlinetech.net

• Scalability Requirements

  • Managing scalability begins by determining your needs. Just how scalable do you need to be?

    
    

  • Generally this is stated in terms of “number of simultaneous users” and “response time”. For example, we need to support 5,000 simultaneous users with average page load of .5 seconds

    
    

  • Infinite scalability has infinite costs, so you’ll have to decide at what point are you willing to have users experience “Server not available"

    
    

• Look to your business stage

  • In most cases, your need and ability to invest in scale is most dependent on the stage of your business

    
    

  • OTC defines these business stages when identifying appropriate scalability: Concept; Seed; Proof-of-Concept; Expansion and Scale to Grow

    
    

  • Ideally you want technology investments made during proof-of-concept stage to be useful during go to market. To do this you have to design for scalability from the start. Otherwise you risk expensive and risky rebuilds as your business scales.

    
    

• Design for scalability

  • Load Balancing as a concept can be applied to any layer in the Internet Delivery Stack to help accomplish scalability

    
    

  • It’s important to think through scalability from the perspective of the entire stack

    
    

  • Poor design at one layer in the stack can undo very scalable designs at other layers

    
    

  • The software itself must be designed for scalability. It cannot be solved with hardware alone

    
    

  • Architect your stack so that scale can be achieved with additional hardware

    
    

  • Scalability costs go up exponentially when the database layer no longer fits on one physical server

    
    

  • Think about using load balancing on the login screen itself

    
    

  • OTC can help you design highly scalable environments to match your business stage