What is Scalability?

Scalability is the ability of an application or computer product to continue to function well as it is changed in size or volume in order to meet a user need. The rescaling is typically to a larger volume or size. It can also be the product itself (for example, it can be a line of computer systems of different sizes). It is also the ability take full advantage of the rescaled situation. For example, you can make an application program scalable if it is possible to move it from a smaller to a larger OS and take full advantage of the larger OS in terms of performance and the larger number of users it is possible to handle.

So what is scalable web application?

First of all, a scalable web application is a webapp a developer has designed like any other app. The difference here is that a web application can grow with time and need more resources to meet user needs. It can also lose users and need less resources. So scalable web application is an application designed so that it can meet users need even if it has less or more users later in its lifecycle. In other words it is also a cloud application.

Nowadays professional developers know that it is the best way to design any application in order to avoid many problems and to save more money. To achieve that they need a cloud platform like Amazon Web Services which offers a lot of services. Note that there are other cloud computing platforms but Amazon Web Services is one of the best.

Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS), is a collection of web services, also called remote computing services, offered by Amazon.com. The picture below shows all their services:

These services operate from 11 places across the world. The well-known of these services include Amazon S3 and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. AWS has been launched since 2006 and is reported in April 2015 to be a very profitable business. Its services include networking, computing, content delivery, storage, database, deployment, management, application services and miscellaneous services.

Which AWS are required to build a web application?

AWS include more than 40 different services a developer can use to build a web application. Here are the main services required for a common web application:

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2): this service use Xen to provide virtual private servers.
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3): it provides web service based storage
• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC): provides a logically isolated set of EC2 instances which can be linked to an existing network through a VPN connection
• Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS): Amazon offers through this service a scalable database server with Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server and PostgreSQL support
• Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM): it is the authentication infrastructure used to authenticate access to various services
• Amazon Route 53 provides a highly available and scalable DNS web service
• Amazon CloudFront: this service is a CDN for distributing objects to edge locations near the requester
• Amazon CloudWatch: this service provides monitoring for AWS cloud applications and resources
• Amazon CloudFormation: is a service which provides other AWS resources through a file-based interface

These services are all you need to start developing a common web application with AWS. So you have many concepts to think about before starting but you don’t need to use all the 40 services. In addition you won’t be disappointed by the documentation. Indeed, Amazon provides rich documentation on each service, white papers, helpful guides, and references architectures for common apps. There is also a program for startups where startups are given one month free to speak with AWS Cloud Support Engineers.

After reading these lines, you might want to use AWS for your web application if you are developer. But if you are not a developer, you can’t become now within two days. But still you can make the next best app of the world. There are companies like Razor Theory which can make it for you. Take a look at our showcase and you won’t be disappointed.