Building Scalable and Resilient Architectures with Microservices on a Budget

In this technology-oriented digital era, thanks to the advancement of technology, it’s not only large scale organizations that practice the designing of building systems that are scalable and resilient; every business organization is required to do the same. Whether you own a start up or a growing up to a company, the applications you run ought to be able to accommodate the scale of growth desired, and remain strong even in the face of adversity. Yet this is the problem: what strategies should be employed to build systems that can withstand heavy load without having the monopoly that large corporations posses in terms of investment and resources.

Hence, just from its relevance, we will discuss how one can approach the problem of designing scalable and timely systems (with emphasis on microservices, serverless, and cloud-native architecture) in a cost-effective way. Before that, let us present what are the main principles and approaches that allow this.

Why Scalability and Resilience Will Always Matter

Scalability is the ability of a system to grow and increase its resources on demand and it will still be able to deliver the same level of service even at peak times. Without scalability, applications may suffer breakdowns from high demands, exasperating the users due to downtime and loss of profits.

Resilience is the opposite of that definition since it means the capability of the being operated without any hitches despite breakdowns occurring in the system. Today, when every other media is used to market a product and downtime can destroy a company’s image in seconds, resilience helps to keep your services accessible at all times.

And this is why these two ideas are foundational for how applications are built today:

Use Case: How a Global Streaming Service Scaled Live Events like Never Before

Let’s Shift to a real-life case study. A global streaming service was unable to perform well in the presence of live events, for example, during big sporting activities or even concerts.

Users began to complain about lagging, delays, or in worst cases total shutdown. In order to address these challenges, the organization had to re-engineer everything and this time around, scalability and resilience were the main focus.

That is how things were taken care of:

Adopted Microservices Architecture: They transformed their monolithic system to microservices, which enabled them to scale different services such as video, authentication, and payment independently. This meant each service could scale up its own load without bringing the whole system down.

User-Based Services: Metaphorically speaking, for the actions prone to non-operation not requiring direct work (for instance, the processing of image), the company employed serverless computing in the form of AWS Lambda. This enabled decreased cost of infrastructure as well as automatic scaling.

Auto-Scaling and Load Balancing: Tools like AWS Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing have been employed where the scale of the resources has been increased or reduced to meet real-time demands through the resources provided. This maintained stability even where there were unforeseen increases in traffic demand.

Cross Deployment for Resilience: In order to mitigate the risk of downtimes resulting from regional failure, they ensured their services were available in multiple regions. This configuration enhanced latency and assured that even if one regional failure occurred, users all over the world would not be affected.

Content Delivery Network (CDN): With the introduction of a CDN to cache content nearer to the users, there was a significant cut in latency as well as traffic directed to their origin servers during busy periods.

This strategic turnaround has equipped the streaming service in a way that it can comfortably accommodate an influx of users during peak times, such as during live events, without any degradation in the quality of the service users experience. What’s the takeaway from this? One does not have to be an organization of great proportions in order to create strong, well-designed solutions that can scale.

Practical Strategies for  Companies

Building similar architectural systems in  companies is how  organizations can construct robust architectural systems. It is a matter of paying attention to certain strategies that are oriented for both scalability as well as cost control. This is how:

1. Adopt Microservices Architecture

With microservices architecture, your application is composed of separate services that can be developed, deployed and scaled independently. The use of this architecture allows for:

• Independent Scaling: Scale particular services when the situation calls for it. For instance, there’s a sale in a retail store, payment services may be put on overdrive while the user authentication service remains unchanged.
• Fault Isolation: A single service may fail without taking down the entire application.
• Faster Development: Services can be developed and released in parallel by different teams.

2. Leverage Serverless Architectures

Serverless computing such as AWS Lambda or Azure Functions nibbles away work on the code and leaves the infrastructure to manage the context. This is ideal to incipient businesses in that;

• Automatic Scaling: Serverless functions automatically scale up and down based on demand thereby appealing to the old issue of managing servers.
• Pay-Only-For-What-You-Use: You are charged for the actual number of calls made, so it is economical.

3. Utilize Cloud-Native Solutions

Utilizing cloud-native technologies is one of the best ways to achieve both horizontal scalability and high availability. Here is how:

• Containers: Using Docker, applications can be maintained within containers for uniformity across various levels.
• Kubernetes: Kubernetes handles the orchestration of your containers, automating deployment, scaling, and management.
  

  Cloud-Native Technology	Benefits
  Docker (Containerization)	Ensures consistent environments and scalable application deployment.
  Kubernetes (Orchestration)	Automates deployment and scaling, essential for managing microservices.

4. Scalability Patterns :

There are tried and tested principles to ensure that your systems do not remain static but scale. For instance,

• Scaling horizontally: where instead of augmenting the capacity of a single unit server, horizontal scaling involves adding more units to distribute the load.
• Event-driven architecture: mesomorphic event processing where services are decoupled with event driven systems (message queues) so that they can efficiently withstand the impact of heavy workloads.
• Caching: Keeping some data values available for easy retrieval in some lightweight storage systems close to the processing units, serveral backend services may choose to use cache ‘databases’ like Redis or Memcached to relieve the load on the backend services and speed up the response.

5. Trade-off between Scalability and Cost.

Cost management is as equally important as it is in Scalability for a start-up:

• Right-Sizing Resources: System usage is persistently accounted for and resource levels are regulated in proportion.
• Spot and Reserved Instances: Lower costs by applying spot instances on tasks that are not of critical importance, reserving instances for workloads that are manageable.
• Cost Tracking Approaches: Engaging in services like AWS Cost Explorer or Azure Cost Management in order to manage expenses for the use of cloud services.

This strategic turnaround has equipped the streaming service in a way that it can comfortably accommodate an influx of users during peak times, such as during live events, without any degradation in the quality of the service users experience. What’s the takeaway from this? One does not have to be an organization of great proportions in order to create strong, well-designed solutions that can scale.

What to learn from Examples of Existing Companies

Example 1: An Organisation in Social Media While growing its user base, a social media website embraced microservices and Kubernetes for great orchestration. Thus, the company managed to scale up some services such as user feeds without affecting other services. The outcome? Minimal service interruption, with the users being happy.

Example 2: An Organisation in FinTech Sweden-A FinTech entity operational in high transaction volume during busy hours for business opted for serverless computing and auto-scaling databases. This included steers them into soft peaks with no heavy cost investment in infrastructure, thus, cost effective performance.

Compunnel’s Expertise in Building Scalable and Resilient Systems

Unlike other software development companies, Compunnel focuses on designing and implementing scalable resilient architecture for  clients. Be it microservices, cloud-native designs, or serverless technologies, the experts will help from the design phase all the till deployment and maintenance.

We appreciate and relate to the problem that the architecture of  organizations presents, and therefore least expensive, we will seek to develop architecture that can be comfortably sustained for the growth of the business. Get in touch now so that you can

learn more about how to create systems that are intended to work for you in the years to come.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why are scalability and resilience important in system design?

Scalability ensures stable performance during high demand, while resilience minimizes downtime and protects user experience during failures. Together, they enable reliable and robust systems.

What is microservices architecture, and how does it help scalability?

Microservices architecture breaks applications into independently scalable services. This allows specific components to handle increased workloads without affecting the entire system, improving performance and fault isolation.

What is the role of auto-scaling in resilient systems?

Auto-scaling dynamically adjusts resources based on real-time demand, ensuring consistent performance during traffic spikes while optimizing resource usage to control costs.

How can Compunnel assist in building scalable systems?

Compunnel specializes in designing scalable and resilient architectures using microservices, serverless technologies, and cloud-native solutions. They support clients from design to deployment and maintenance.

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