Chapter 19. Continuous Improvement

If your application is successful, you’ll need to scale it to handle larger traffic volumes. This requires more novel and complicated mechanisms to handle this increased traffic, and your application quality can suffer under the increased burdens.

Typically, application developers don’t build in scalability from the beginning. We often think we have done what was necessary to let our application scale to the highest levels we can imagine. But, more often than not, we find faults in our application that make scaling to larger traffic volumes and larger datasets less and less possible.

How can we improve the scalability of our applications, even when we begin to reach these limits? Obviously, the sooner we consider scalability in the lifecycle of an application, the easier it will be to scale. But at any point during the lifecycle, there are many techniques you can use to improve the scalability of your application.

This chapter discusses a few of these techniques.

Examine Your Application Regularly

Parts I and II provided extensive coverage on maintaining a highly available application and managing the risk inherent in the application. Before you can consider techniques for scaling your application, you must get your application availability and risk management in shape. Nothing else matters until you make this leap and make these improvements. If you do not implement these changes now, up front, you will find that as your application scales, ...

Get Architecting for Scale now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.