5 Tips to Improve the Performance and Scalability of Your Digital Applications

5 Tips to Improve the Performance and Scalability of Your Digital Applications

Jun. 18, 2024

In today's fast-paced, ever-changing digital world, custom-building digital applications that delight your customers alone is not enough. To ensure that your web and mobile applications can cope with rapid user surges and remain resilient and responsive under peak workloads, it is critical to focus on enhancing their scalability and performance. Neglecting this could lead to several detrimental consequences including recurring system failure, sub-par user experience, risk and compliance issues, reputational damage, and the derailment of your business growth.

Scalability needs to be embedded at every phase of the software development lifecycle; otherwise, you leave your applications susceptible to break down during the ebbs and flows of your customer demand. In fact, 85% of software applications end up failing due to inherent scalability issues. By the time businesses identify these issues and throw the kitchen sink at re-engineering their applications, it is often too little too late.

Improving Application Scalability and Performance

With nearly one out of every three organisations focusing on revamping their legacy IT systems as their top digital transformation goal in 2024, the quest towards developing cutting-edge applications to deliver best-in-class customer experiences is well and truly on. Having scalable, efficient, and resilient applications reduces the need to frequently update them and rectify performance issues, thereby saving your time, effort, and cost, and putting your business in pole position to capitalise on emerging market opportunities.

Listed below are five effective ways to enhance the performance and scalability of your digital applications:

1. Transitioning from monolithic to microservices architecture

The first step to build scalable applications is to start with selecting the right architectural design. Shifting from monolithic architecture to microservices can be instrumental in eliminating the need for full integration testing, boosting agility, and enabling faster and more efficient application deployments. In a microservices set-up, your application is broken down into loosely coupled and compartmentalised services associated with specific functionalities. This allows for incorporating a modular design and faster iterations as the independent components can be scaled quickly that the rigid structure that exists in monoliths.

2. Containerising applications and orchestrating them on Kubernetes

Containerisation, as the name suggests, is a technique of automating and simplifying the provisioning and deployment of applications by running them in isolated runtime environments called containers. By orchestrating them with a platform like Kubernetes, containers can be added easily to cope with increased application workloads without compromising on responsiveness. This enables DevOps teams to minimise unnecessary downtimes, speed up their Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, and increase the overall ease and efficiency of building, testing, and deploying customer-facing applications.

3. Using caching and load balancing techniques

Each time a user loads a page on your website, your browser needs to download a large volume of data to display all the features on your webpage. When there are hundreds of thousands of users loading a page simultaneously, your database engine is at risk of being overloaded, no matter how strong your database solution is. Caching is an effective way of coping with this challenge by storing frequently accessed data in temporary locations to reduce the total load on your backend servers and database. Content Delivery Networks (CDN) are commonly used to cache content in proxy servers that are stationed in closer proximity to your end customers than the origin servers, thereby helping to accelerate the delivery of content. Load balancers are also effective tools to evenly distribute the incoming requests across multiple servers, ensuring that a single server does not crumble under intense pressure. This ensures that your application stays responsive and performs optimally, even under peak usage.

4. Addressing code inefficiencies and database query bottlenecks

Databases can often be at the heart of performance bottlenecks and code inefficiencies, thereby impacting the ease of integration and scalability of digital applications. To address these issues, it is critical to optimise under-performing queries by rewriting them and leveraging robust database performance monitoring tools provided by PostgreSQL, SQL Server, or other database management systems (DBMS). Strategies like indexing, denormalization, database caching, and query optimisation can facilitate the effective distribution of high-volume data across multiple database instances and avoid unnecessary subqueries, helping you achieve higher scalability and resilience.

5. Building secure and scalable API gateways

API gateways are the backbone of your web applications. Scaling them is key to increasing your throughput to accommodate sudden spikes in user traffic, as well as reducing latency and response times. By optimising code quality, effectively pre-empting and troubleshooting issues within your API gateways, and having asynchronous processing, you can handle several incoming requests concurrently, minimise data consistency and integrity issues, and achieve greater resilience and security. Choosing the right API gateway, therefore, is a vital cog in your ability to scale your applications in an efficient and cost-effective way.

As the competition to win over customers heats up by the day, there is hardly any margin for error. One strike in the form of an application breakdown and you could be out of the game, even before you can react. Building high-performing and scalable applications is a superpower that can enable businesses to stay ahead of the curve – ultimately separating the digital leaders from the laggards in the long run.