Andrew Brereton's Lifestream

13 Scalability Best Practices

August 12 2009, 1:43pm

AFK Partners has release what they feel are the Best Practices for Scalability: 1. Asynchronous - Use asynchronous communication when possible. 2. Swim Lanes – Create fault isolated “swim lanes” of hardware by customer segmentation. 3. Cache - Make use of cache at multiple layers. 4. Monitoring - Understand your application’s performance from a customer’s perspective. 5. Replication - Replicate databases for recovery as well as to off load reads to multiple instances. 6. Sharding - Split the application and databases by service and / or by customer using a modulus. 7. Use Few RDBMS Features – Use the OLTP database as a persistent storage device as much as possible. 8. Slow Roll – Roll out new code versions slowly, to a small subset of your servers without bringing the entire site down. 9. Load & Performance Testing – Test the performance of the application version before it goes into production. 10. Capacity Planning / Scalability Summits – Know how much capacity you have on all tiers and services in your system. 11. Rollback – Always have the ability to rollback a code release. 12. Root Cause Analysis - Ensure you have a learning culture that is evident by utilizing Root Cause Analysis to find and fix the real cause of issues. 13. Quality From The Beginning – Quality can’t be tested into a product, it must be designed in from the beginning. This is jut a quick summary, more details on their site.