Week 3: Scalability and Performance
1. Scalability Principles:
- Lecture 1: Understanding Scalability
- Scalability is the ability of a system to handle growing amounts of work.
- Imagine it like adding more lanes to a highway to accommodate more cars.
- Discuss why scalability is crucial for modern applications.
- Lecture 2: Scalability Techniques
- Explore techniques like parallel processing and distributed computing.
- Highlight the importance of breaking bottlenecks.
- Lab 1: Identifying Scalability Challenges
- Analyze a small web application and identify potential scalability bottlenecks.
- Propose solutions for each bottleneck.
2. Horizontal vs. Vertical Scaling:
- Lecture 3: Horizontal Scaling
- Horizontal scaling means adding more machines or instances to a system.
- Think of it as adding more cars to a fleet.
- Example: Expanding a web application by adding more servers.
- Lecture 4: Vertical Scaling
- Vertical scaling means upgrading a single machine’s resources (e.g., CPU, RAM).
- Compare it to making a car engine more powerful.
- Example: Increasing the RAM of a database server.
- Lab 2: Planning for Horizontal and Vertical Scaling
- Given a scenario, decide whether horizontal or vertical scaling is more suitable.
- Create a scaling plan for a web application.
3. Caching Strategies:
- Lecture 5: Introduction to Caching
- Caching is like storing frequently used information in a readily accessible place.
- Example: Saving a frequently used textbook page on your desk for quick reference.
- Lecture 6: Types of Caching
- Explore client-side caching, server-side caching, and distributed caching.
- Discuss the trade-offs between them.
- Lab 3: Implementing Caching
- Implement client-side caching in a simple web application to reduce load times.
- Measure the performance improvement.
4. Load Balancing and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs):
- Lecture 7: Load Balancing
- Load balancing distributes incoming traffic across multiple servers.
- Compare it to distributing the weight evenly in a game of tug-of-war.
- Example: A website directing users to the least busy server.
- Lecture 8: Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)
- CDNs distribute content geographically to reduce latency.
- Imagine it like having multiple copies of a book in different libraries.
- Example: A video streaming service caching popular videos closer to users.
- Lab 4: Load Balancing and CDN Configuration
- Set up load balancing for a simple web application.
- Configure a CDN to serve static assets and measure the latency improvement.
Homework Assignment:
- Research and document a real-world example of a website or application that significantly improved its scalability and performance through caching and load balancing.
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