Purpose of the entry
On Saturday June 13th 2009 I attended a talk by Eli White on Scalable web applications. Eli White previously worked at digg.com and now holds the position PHP Community Manager & DevZone Editor-in-Chief at Zend Technologies. When you hear him talk you immediately notice he has a high knowledge on programming, good practices and he is eager to distribute his knowledge and does it with passion. That explains his position at Zend. Eli gave for what I am concerned the best talk at the conference. Of course I didn’t attend all talks but I can hardly imagine a talk more interesting than this. He gave valuable tips on how to implement new projects with small tips. He showed you how you could already take some small steps that would lead to great benefit if your application would turn out to be mass consumed. The following entry is my interpretation of the talk itself.
Overview
- What is scalable application design
- Tip 1: load balancing the webserver
- Tip 2: scaling from a single DB server to a Master-Slave setup
- Tip 3: Partitioning, Vertical DB Scaling
- Tip 4: Partitioning, horizontal DB Scaling
- Tip 5: Application Level Partitioning
- Tip 6: Caching to get around your database
- Resources
- Closing notes
What is scalable application design
Scalable application design first means, there is a design for an application. So there is a start on the application itself. It is no use designing and thinking on how to create your killer application by trying to fit in as many good practices as possible, so that in the end you feel discouraged in even beginning to program. First step in creating an application is actually beginning. Do not overkill the project with great ideas which will take forever to implement or require you to study till you drop. Does this mean you do not have to study or apply good design principles? Of course not, you should on a permanent basis. It should become a habit, a second nature. It just means do not overdo it in the way you will never begin the project at all. To make it easy for you Eli gave some practical tips which you can apply immediately without any problems and which doesn’t require any real study or understanding of design principles.
