How can you ensure that your optimized system architecture remains scalable as your business grows?

Yes, Elasticity in architecture is necessary given the current unpredictable trend of app usage. Cloud services can serve well in this scenario to handle peaks in demand. Depending on the business requirements, one can choose between horizontal or vertical scaling to achieve the best throughput and maximize resource utilization and performance. Overall, these allow us to reduce costs instead of the expensive ways. These approaches along with concepts like virtualization, parallelism, and resource pre-emption, can achieve the best results.

Load balancing distributes network traffic across the available resources throughout the world without routing all the requests to one server. There are several ways to choose a destination resource in the network. This helps systems reduce DOS attacks on servers and ensures the network is secure and not overwhelmed with requests. Depending on the use, we use weighted round-robin, least response time, source ip hash or other methods. The Load balancer uses these algorithms and decides which instance picks the request and connects our req to it.

Cloud services provide monitoring tools and allow us to upscale or downscale to a desired value depending on our need. They also analyze the network usage and suggest anticipated trends. AWS Cloudwatch is a powerful tool to monitor applications and troubleshoot apps to reduce mean time to resolution.

Use Universal Scalability Law (USL) to model and to optimize scalability of your system. USL quantifies scalability based on parameters such as contention and coherency. Contention refers to delay due to waiting or queueing for shared resources. Coherence refers to delay for data to become consistent. For example, having a high contention indicates sequential processing that could be parallelized, while having a high coherency suggests excessive dependencies among processes, prompting you to minimize interactions. Also, with help of USL, you can, in advance, calculate the maximum effective capacity of your system: scaling up your system beyond that point is a waste.