Serving Billions of Daily Web Requests with Your Own Flexible Infrastructure

New websites may have little to no visitors in their few days of existance. But when it grows popular, more traffic is expected to come. Most websites that are put online never see billions of page requests per day. But those that do, needs a lot to consider to ensure all those visitors are happy.

Billions of request per day translates to over ten thousand a second. How do those websites can keep up with the traffic: acquire new customers, re-engage existing ones, and still performing well? If you have a website that is aiming for that amount of traffic, you should seek ways to scale without increasing anything unnecessary.

As new technologies are introduced, you need to adapt to the changes to make your system more secure and faster. That in turn will make it more reliable.

And when you aim to become bigger, you can't just eat your way to the roof. You need to leave space to grow by building a bigger house.

Cost and Scale

When price matters, the increase of website visitors usually means more engagement and more resources. And people usually solve the issue by hiring more people and purchasing better hardware. But to be cost-effective, you need to handle all those load without requiring a linear increase in budget. So if you're expecting twice the amount of traffic, your aim is to not double your server(s), or double your man power.

All you need is an infrastructure that is more efficient. Some businesses that are able to implement this practice can handle more request despite reducing their servers and workforce.

At a large system, there is no one-solution-fits-all. To distribute all that load, you need to move beyond an off-the-shelve solution and use your own custom-built system with custom-made components. No matter what industry you're in, you need to build a distributed system out of them carefully. As more visitors means more load, each and every components are aspects to change.

Because there is a lot of solution for a single problem, you need to plan in having a flexible infrastructure. Before starting to upgrade, you need to realize that the ecosystem is changing rapidly, and to manage that ever-changing situation, you need to have a flexible system to adapt.

That flexible system is where you'll place all your innovations, no matter what the market needs, no matter how your condition will be. Your infrastructure should be able to adapt any circumstances. This is to provide you the ease for not reinventing the whole infrastructure in the worst case scenario.

Adaptable Infrastructure

To handle those massive amount of request, you need to build an infrastructure stack that includes: your web servers, real-time caching, databases, distributed services, parallel computing, and others.

At the front end, is where your web servers are. The purpose of these servers are to answer all those requests your visitors are sending you per day. When the visitor requests something, you need give what they want by: search the database for the information, storing what's needed, deliver the information to the user, and so forth. All that in a matter of milliseconds.

To ease the work, you need a real-time caching. This is to make information readily available whenever certain user are requesting. Caching means to store needed information so it will be available in the next period in order to eliminate the time needed to rebuild the information from zero.

When you have billion so requests per day, the chances are you have a massive database that stores information that people actually like. To manage all those database and visitors, you need a set of analytics, data reporting, data warehousing, data-science functions, and more. At a large scale, all of these should be distributed.

Distributed services will give you many advantages. Some are: the ability to access information remotely, availability of log files as a transactional unit, subscription of services to their corresponding needs, and so forth.

The next is parallel computing. This is needed to distribute and process that ongoing data. Having a distributed computation means that it can scale to handle huge data loads.

As all those components are connected through your distributed log-based architecture, you can then innovate though it by plugging other components into that system. Different tools have different purpose, and by having a log-based architecture, you can hook all your data sources through the logs and centralize all your real-time subscriptions.

Evaluation the Options

By having a flexible infrastructure, you can evolve your platform into something else with relative ease. Some websites started building with one or more programming languages. The less programming language is used, the faster and easier for most developers to create. The same applies to database. As a starter, most websites are hosted on shared hosting environment.

Once the traffic increases and the demand peaks beyond your available resources, you can transition your programming language to others that have lower level of memory manipulation and lower level of programming language for better performance, efficiency and flexibility. The same goes for other components.

Bringing in new software can be expensive and time-consuming. Whether it's open source or licensed software, you need to see which is best for your system. Careful evaluation is needed to test whether a product is perfectly suited for you or not.

To ease your effort, you can try seeking those that already use a product, and search for proven use cases. Many products are comparable, but not every product that fits others will fit you well. A test can be the best option, but if you don't have the required resources, some of the options you have are: searching for products that have the most documentation, search for products that fit to your other components with less flaws or re-arrangements and platform risks.

If you're on a strict budget, searching for products that you have no experience in using, or having no knowledge to maintain it, is making that product next to useless to you.

Conclusion

There is no single technology that can answer all problems given to it. Because of that, companies need to implement different technologies to address different kind of issues and needs. Applying certain technology can be viewed as an advantage or a disadvantage to customers, partners, or investors. But as long as your infrastructure is flexible enough in matching your business goals, it will have a better chance to serve your business rather than destroying it, if you can manage it well.