scaling

The holidays are right around the corner and I want to make sure that you aren’t stressed out about your online configuration. So let’s start looking at how to prepare for the holiday rush as soon as possible. Today I will talk about scaling for the holidays.

Image via Wikipedia

When developing your application from the ground up, keep scalability in mind. Your application may run perfectly on your desktop or even after you’ve launched on the Cloud, but how will it run when you receive a swarm of visitors trying to access your application at the same time?  You can always upgrade on the fly in the Cloud, but there will always be a cap. It’s important to think about a strategy for growth before you launch into production.

Online game developers have a unique set of challenges when it comes to success. One challenge is that they need to scale – quickly. If their game goes viral – as the biggest games undoubtedly do – the game needs to stay online or else it’s toast. This also leads into a second challenge, which is availability and performance. There’s nothing more frustrating to a gamer than to be in the middle of an intense play and have the game freeze. Any way you look at it, it’s not cool – for the gamer or the developer.

Rackspace’s very own Emil Sayegh has a great article posted on CIO.com titled “Navigating the Labyrinth: Choosing a Hosting Infrastructure.” Here is a teaser:

“Should I be using LAMP?”