IoT Evangelist
Scalability in web applications has become crucial in the past years. An ever-growing number of devices and clients, connected to the Internet, makes it difficult to handle the traffic by a single server. Scalability is a characteristic of a system that tells if expanding the resources of a server(s) will make it run faster (or handle more load).
Modern web applications that serve data and content to millions of users run in clustered environments. Dealing with a huge amount of connections at the same time requires many resources. That resources are CPU time and RAM. Each and every connection produces an additional load on the server. Having just one server would require a vast amount of resources and we already know that Moore’s Law is no longer valid. That said we need multiple servers ready to respond to users’ requests. Web applications use HTTP(S) protocol which works in the request-response communication method. Upon user’s request, the server will prepare the response and send it back. Every response needs to be processed by the server and that’s the key factor in provisioning resources for the server – requests may be different, starting from simple static data like CSS or images to more demanding like requesting data from database, filtering or calculating certain data.