How do you build Scalable Saas Applications that users not only love but come over & over again? We’ve listed out tips from our tech experts so that you can make sure they’re using the best of Saas Scalability tips without failure. Here’s what some of the best practices for producing scalable saas applications at far lower cost.

1.Pick the right technology:

Not every weapon is good for every battle. You need to choose your weapon depending on whom you are going to fight, the distance between you and your opponent, the type of damage you want to do etc. So is it with software technologies. No technology is a best fit for all requirements. No one size fits all. You need to plan for your needs, design your system with an architect and move forward with your technology. If you are planning to build a next multi million dollar business you need to consider this seriously  

2.Pick right Database: 

Just as in the case of technology, choosing a database is also very critical depending on your requirement. Do you value data consistency over data write then go for RDBMS. If you have more writes and not concerned about the data consistency instantly like in the case of a social media application with huge data use combination NoSQL Databases like MongoDB. If you choose to handle different types of data you could choose a mix of both these databases. Finetune your databases to match the best performance. 

3.Avoid single point of failure:

All the perfect software written and running perfectly is of no use if our system has been deployed to a single point of failure architecture. The single point of failure is when your entire system collapses if there is a failure in one part of your system. You need to plan for redundancy while deploying your system. Design for backup systems which can take up the load when your main systems are down. This can be done for both databases and servers.  

4.Make thick clients:

These days due to huge data inflow and outflow, large-scale systems have evolved into performing business logic and minor validations on client-side. Make your clients perform UI rendering, basic validations, minor processing, etc on your client-side so that your servers are reserved to serve critical data to the other clients. Angular, React, Vue are some of the good examples of client-side frameworks which help achieve the above. 

5.Cache results:

Why does anyone want to burden their servers by requesting the same data from the database several times and overload it. If it’s very frequently accessible data better we go and cache it to use it next time without much load on the system. Use cache wisely and be cautious to keep your cache up to date to keep your data consistent.  

6.Use load balancers:

Load balancers help to balance your load to multiple servers behind them. It helps in maintaining your system up and running most of the time even if one of the systems goes down.  

7.Go stateless: 

With latest deployment architectures your highly scalable application will run several systems behind a load balancers. Most probably each server doesn’t know the state of other server. When two requests are received by same client and a load balancer redirects the request to two different servers it will be hard for them to understand them if they are not stateless. Always design your system to do stateless requests so that all your load bearing systems can handle them as and when there is a request from your client.  

8.Test it before you push it:

This seems obvious to test before you make it to production. But it is highly recommended to have complete set of automation regression test suite to run on your systems before moving it to production. If you don’t have automation tests, at least start doing regression manually to find out issues in development phases. In few cases new features or library updates may break existing functionality which costs a lot for software teams if the issue is found in production,  

9.Load and Performance test regularly:

 This is another aspect many may not be focusing on doing load and performance testing consistently. Before the first launch of your application it is considered a priority and eventually it will loose its importance. We are constantly developing the application and adding new features. The user demand may increase as well in the mean time. All the new bug fixes and new features when released must be tested for its load and performance. 

10.Prepare for the worst, expect the best:

 As an old saying says it all, Prepare for the worst and expect the best to happen. It is true in software systems as well. Plan your infrastructure, support teams ahead with disaster recovery mechanisms. When the disaster happens expect the best to happen when you in recover mode.  

11.Asynchronous communication:

There may be several cases where you can use asynchronous communication wherever possible to avoid wastage of application resources. Some examples of this asynchronous communication could be making a facebook post. The system could return the success message and handle posting it on others walls, analysing the post etc later on by putting them into a queue.  

12.Modularity:

Modularity is the key for building large applications with hundreds of features. Imagine a university with all different departments, teaching, administration, cleaning, fee collection and many other departments built and functioning well with interaction. This is how a software application is also supposed to function. Build your system as a module, an email sending module doesn’t need to know what is the subject or topic of email. Given an email you that module should send it off. An order management module doesn’t know which user placed the order but process it as it gets a new order. If the system is designed modularly its easy to maintain as well as to scale.  

Stay tuned with Saasro at www.saasro.com for your technological journey into saas. 

Do follow us on Twitter,Facebook,Instagram for more such interesting updates!