The 7 Stages of Scaling Web Apps

Tuesday, September 23, 2008 at 4:22AM
Todd Hoff in scaling

By John Engales CTO, Rackspace. Good presentation of the stages a typical successful website goes through:

• Stage 1 - The Beginning: Simple architecture, low complexity. no redundancy. Firewall, load balancer, a pair of web servers, database server, and internal storage.
• Stage 2 - More of the same, just bigger.
• Stage 3 - The Pain Begins: publicity hits. Use reverse proxy, cache static content, load balancers, more databases, re-coding.
• Stage 4 - The Pain Intensifies: caching with memcached, writes overload and replication takes too long, start database partitioning, shared storage makes sense for content, significant re-architecting for DB.
• Stage 5 - This Really Hurts!: rethink entire application, partition on geography user ID, etc, create user clusters, using hashing scheme for locating which user belongs to which cluster.
• Stage 6 - Getting a little less painful: scalable application and database architecture, acceptable performance, starting to add ne features again, optimizing some code, still growing but manageable.
• Stage 7 - Entering the unknown: where are the remaining bottlenecks (power, space, bandwidth, CDN, firewall, load balancer, storage, people, process, database), all eggs in one basked (single datacenter, single instance of data).

Article originally appeared on (http://highscalability.com/).