Chapter 7. Infrastructure Design and Planning
Whether you are beginning to plan for the launch of a large website or managing the growing pains of an existing site, you will quickly come to the point where one server is not enough to handle the traffic to your site, or you need more reliability than a single server can provide. However, the leap from a single server to a multiserver infrastructure is a large one. There are a number of ways to architect your environment to ensure fast response times to your visitors and allow you the potential to further scale in the future.
Your infrastructure design will vary greatly based on your website’s requirements. What kind of high availability do you require? What response times will your users or your management consider acceptable? Does your site require any “extra” services or applications, outside of a standard LAMP stack? All of these considerations and (of course, expected traffic to the site) will need to be taken into account when designing, building, and maintaining a multiserver hosting environment. There is no silver bullet solution for everyone, but we can provide some guidelines that should make it easy to find the right solution for your particular needs.
Horizontal and Vertical Scaling
There are two approaches to scaling out an infrastructure to add additional resources: horizontal scaling (“scaling out”) and vertical scaling (“scaling up”). Horizontal scaling involves adding additional servers while vertical scaling involves ...