How to create applications that scale horizontally?

Creating applications that scale horizontally is a big challenge – and more common than we think! Understanding how this scaling process works can benefit your business in many ways.  

This is a multi-step job: splitting the system dataset, loading it onto multiple servers, figuring out how many extra servers you need… And so on. First of all, know that this process does not have to be a headache. Understanding how horizontally scaling applications can help you make better decisions for your business.

What are applications that scale horizontally?

The cloud provides an infrastructure that can be changed and adapted to handle an increasing or decreasing workload. This process can be called scaling , which can be up or down , and means that our infrastructure can easily scale up, scale or down depending on the needs of the system.

Scaling up consists of adding instances to our group, that is, increasing the processing capacity of a solution. Scaling down is removing instances from the group, reducing associated costs. Therefore, applications that scale horizontally are those capable of increasing or decreasing the capacity of a system by adding or removing components and nodes.

Why build applications that scale horizontally?

The cloud is built to provide infinite scalability of its resources, but that advantage is worthless if your own application is not designed to take advantage of it.

Building applications that scale horizontally is critical to:

• Have instant and continuous availability;
• Pay only for the capacity you use;
• Scale and resize accordingly to your needs.

How to create applications that scale horizontally

There are some essential practices for creating applications that scale horizontally.

1. When creating applications that scale horizontally, you must know what will be shared when you want to scale them. It is very important to identify all the bottlenecks in the initial phase;
2. Develop a service-oriented architecture. Using independent web , application, caching, and database tiers is critical to scaling on demand. Without it, you will have to scale every component of your application as your workload increases. Don't forget to think about authentication, load balancers up & down scaling rules , task parallelization;
3. Choose the framework . This is an often-overlooked topic, but it's a vital decision for building applications that scale horizontally . The most common are: ASP.NET, Django, Flask, Ruby on Rails, Angular and React;
4. Simulate your horizontal scalability! It is very difficult to identify what will and will not fail when you increase the workload beyond the usual limits. You need to test and see exactly how scaling affects throughput;
5. Migrate to the cloud. Using a serverless architecture is great for applications that scale horizontally.

How to save money with applications that scale horizontally

Creating applications that scale horizontally requires high availability, high scalability, and high efficiency. However, the solutions available in the market often come with a high price tag.

To help you solve this dilemma, we created Sky.Saver , a solution capable of reducing your AWS infrastructure costs by up to 80%. We promote all the benefits of EC2 instances at the price of SPOT instances.

With a helping hand from artificial intelligence, we offer uncomplicated, scalable and cost-effective management. Best of all, there are no fixed costs with Sky.Saver . You only pay a percentage of the amount saved, in reais.

Try Sky.Saver for 15 days . Talk to our experts and start saving today .