Successfully scaling your software applications
By Jon Hewines, Technical Director at Product and Service Design Consultancy, Full Clarity
Ensuring software applications can scale to meet the demands of users is a key priority for Chief Technology Officers (CTOs). Doing so enables a CTO to have confidence in the reliability of the system, reach a wider audience and deliver more value to customers.
A key component of scaling applications is the separation of concerns – the process of ensuring the elements of your application (and the people who code it) are loosely coupled. This can bring vast benefits in terms of scalability, maintenance, and improved user experience.
Application scaling challenges
Most CTOs would agree that the scaling and maintenance of software applications is a sensible pathway. But there are several challenges associated with doing so:
Finding the right tech talent – there is a global skills gap in technology, and finding employees with the right mix of technical skills is difficult. Freelancers can offer fractional benefits, but they may not be available when you need them.
Addressing team cohesion – even assuming you can find a team of talented developers that have all the required skills, you need to keep them motivated and working well together. It can be hard to find the time to build team cohesion when you are constantly firefighting.
Dealing with technical debt – all applications can accrue technical debt. This is particularly true when there is relentless business pressure to ship features. Staying on top of technical debt is an ongoing challenge, made worse if the architecture of an application is made of tightly coupled modules which are brittle and difficult to change.
Managing design debt – as with technical debt, applications also accrue design debt (also known as product bloat), such as navigation menus with too many items tacked on the end, repetitive UI, and forms that have been hacked together with little consideration for the user journey. These issues can all have a profound effect on the perceived value of a product.
Shipping features – it can take a lot of effort to get a feature out the door. As well as gathering requirements, UX/UI design, technical implementation, testing, and deployment, there is room for friction that can slow everything to a halt. Meanwhile, there are bugs, customer feedback, stakeholder management and more to factor in.
Scaling an application is hard – whether you are trying to handle more network requests, build out new functionality or move to the cloud, scaling an application is no mean feat. Depending on your architecture and team, this can be a significant challenge and one that busy CTOs don’t have the time, energy or resources to tackle on their own.
Fortunately, there are several approaches to address these challenges:
- Separating the business logic and data access layers of a monolithic application into microservices supported by stateless REST APIs.
- Separating the UI layer into separate applications such as React web applications and mobile apps.
- Separating human resources into teams which specialise in their field and can work in parallel.
Together, these strategies can bring significant benefits in terms of scalability, flexibility, resilience, technology diversity, team utilisation and ease of maintenance. But it’s critical for enterprises to approach it in the right way:
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail – it is critical to map out a robust architecture which separates the concerns of your application into discrete modules which function independently and can be accessed through clear APIs. The key question to ask is: could I replace this module completely without breaking the larger application?
Look to the cloud – many legacy applications run on dedicated on-prem servers. Cloud providers such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud can enable massive scalability by managing hardware, allowing an organisation to scale out (and in) on demand.
Focus on unique value proposition – most applications feature functionality such as email, chat, auth and search which are not product differentiators. Don’t spend time building and maintaining these when solutions such as SendGrid, Algolia and Auth0 are available. The free up teams to focus on the unique aspects of your application and deliver value to customers.
Work with specialists – microservices allow you to separate concerns in terms of technology, but just as importantly they free up your human resources to work independently and play to their strengths. Look for developers and partners that you trust and are experts in their field.
Manage your teams effectively – once your technical and human concerns are separated, the job becomes about facilitating communication, ensuring that your teams are working in parallel on high priority features which deliver value to users. An Agile approach can help keep teams focused and enable you to plan and schedule releases which ensure teams feed into each other as needed.
Jesse Pitts has been with the Global Banking & Finance Review since 2016, serving in various capacities, including Graphic Designer, Content Publisher, and Editorial Assistant. As the sole graphic designer for the company, Jesse plays a crucial role in shaping the visual identity of Global Banking & Finance Review. Additionally, Jesse manages the publishing of content across multiple platforms, including Global Banking & Finance Review, Asset Digest, Biz Dispatch, Blockchain Tribune, Business Express, Brands Journal, Companies Digest, Economy Standard, Entrepreneur Tribune, Finance Digest, Fintech Herald, Global Islamic Finance Magazine, International Releases, Online World News, Luxury Adviser, Palmbay Herald, Startup Observer, Technology Dispatch, Trading Herald, and Wealth Tribune.