Full Stack Web Performance

Introduction

We are in the midst of another tidal change in the software engineering and IT industries. This has been going on for a number of years already, but like the frog in the pot that doesn’t notice the water slowly beginning to boil around him, some of us might not have noticed the transitions in our environment. We’ve overlooked these transitions because there have been many smaller ones that we just adjusted to, that accumulated to be a big significant change. Or maybe it’s just that the ideas behind these changes have been talked about for quite some time, but it’s only relatively recently that they have coalesced into actionable patterns that are easy to implement and reproduce.

I was reminded of this recently because some of my teams—specifically those that are working on products that we made three or more years ago—are migrating their products from physical datacenters to cloud platforms.

Think about that for a minute: three or four years ago we were starting new projects first by requesting nodes—in some cases, virtual machines (VMs) on a hypervisor, and in other cases actual physical boxes—and IP blocks, waiting days, or in most cases, even weeks for the boxes to be configured. Today, of course, we run a script and our cloud platform of choice spins up nodes preconfigured with the image that we want nearly instantaneously.

Our notions of web performance and capacity planning, too, have changed. Now if we need to scale a cloud web-native application to handle ...